THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


IN  MEMORY  OF 
MRS.  VIRGINIA  B.  SPORER 


ARTHUR    HUGH    CLOUGH 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/arthurhughcloughOOosboiala 


Arthur    Hugh    Clough 


BY 

JAMES  INSLEY  OSBORNE 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 
1920 


College 
library 

TR 

mo 

CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

J  Childhood 7 

II  At  Rugby 15 

III  As  Undergraduate  .        .        ....      37 

IV  As  Fellow  of  Oriel 57 

V  The  Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich     .        .        .87 

VI  Amours  de  Voyage 112 

VII  DiPSYCHUS /""^^ 

VIII  Last  Years 155 

IX  Conclusion 176 


11S1C82 


CHAPTER  I 

CHILDHOOD 

ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH  was  born  in  Liver- 
pool on  January  i,  1819.  His  father,  James 
Butler  Clough,  was  a  cotton  merchant,  belonging 
to  an  old  and  respectable  Welsh  family.  His 
mother's  maiden  name  was  Anne  Perfect.  She  was 
the  daughter  of  a  banker  living  at  Pontefract  in 
Yorkshire. 

There  is  little  or  nothing  in  the  poet's  ancestry 
to  point  to  as  indicative  of  forthcoming  genius. 
From  the  days  of  Henry  VHI  the  Cloughs  had 
lived  in  the  country,  raised  large  families,  and  kept 
their  annals  brief.  There  was,  indeed,  an  eighteenth- 
century  Hugh  Clough,  friend  of  Cowper  and  Fellow 
of  King's  College,  who  got  himself  known  as  a  poet  ; 
but  his  example  was  hardly  powerful  enough  to 
influence  his  younger  kinsman.  Were  it  not  so 
remote,  a  reported  relationship  with  John  Calvin 
might  furnish  more  interesting  ground  for  specula- 
tion than  this  poetical  connection. 

The  home  county  of  the  Cloughs  was  Denbighshire, 
in  North  Wales.  There  the  foundations  of  a  con- 
siderable family  fortune  had  been  laid  by  a  sixteenth- 
century  Sir  Richard  Clough,  who  invested  in  lands 

7 


8  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

and  buildings  in  his  native  county  the  money  he 
made  in  Antwerp  as  the  agent  of  Sir  Thomas  Gres- 
ham,  and  in  Hamburg  as  court  master  of  the  Fel- 
lowship of  Merchant  Adventurers.  His  descendants 
enjoyed  considerable  prosperity  and  respect  through- 
out the  following  two  centuries  without  finding 
it  necessary  to  bestir  themselves  particularly.  But 
one  Roger  Clough  of  the  late  eighteenth  century,  a 
clergyman  and  the  grandfather  of  Arthur  Hugh, 
lost  in  a  bank  failure  the  greater  part  both  of  his 
own  fortune  and  the  fortune  he  had  married,  and 
left  his  ten  children  comparatively  impoverished. 
James  Butler  was  the  third  child.  He  left  Wales 
to  go  into  business  in  Liverpool,  married  there  in 
1816,  and  had  four  children — Charles  Butler,  born 
1817  ;  Arthur  Hugh,  1819  ;  Anne  Jemima,  1820  ; 
and  George  Augustus,  1821. 

Arthur  Clough  and  his  sister  both  mention  their 
mother's  family,  the  Perfects,  only  in  connection 
with  a  specific  family  imperfection.  Arthur  alludes 
to  it  in  a  letter  he  writes  from  Rugby  to  his  younger 
brother :  "  Only  remember,  don't  be  indolent, 
George  ;  you  recollect  what  I  told  you  about  that 
family  failing.  Idle,  I  do  not  think  you  will 
be ;  but  take  care  you  never  say,  '  It  is  too 
much  trouble,'  '  I  can't  be  bothered,'  which  are 
tolerably  old  favourites  of  yours,  and  indeed  of 
all  who  have  any  Perfect  blood  in  them."  What- 
ever trouble  it  may  have  given  his  brother,  the 
family  faiUng  did  not  prevent  Arthur  Hugh's  life 


CHILDHOOD  9 

from  becoming  a  record  of  close  application  to 
duty.  Or  it  affected  him  perhaps,  from  this  point 
of  view,  in  the  manner  of  an  inoculation,  somewhat 
as  the  shiftlessness  o^  the  elder  Dickens  was  a  prin- 
cipal cause  of  the  amazing  industry  of  his  son.  But 
it  is  possible  to  view  the  poet's  life  in  another  light, 
in  which  his  freedom  from  Perfect  indolence  is  not 
so  certain.  Perhaps  he  seemed  busier  than,  in  a 
narrower  sense,  he  really  was.  After  all,  he  regarded 
writing  as  his  work,  and  yet  wrote  little.  His  other 
activities,  so  vigorously  pursued,  would  appear  in 
this  light  as  evasions  rather  than  efforts,  as  devices 
for  distractiijg  the  attention  from  the  one  point 
to  which  a  more  genuine  industry  would  have  kept 
it  turned. 

This  appearance  of  a  certain  mental  laziness  in 
Clough's  adult  life  has  been  connected,  very  much 
less  reasonably,  with  another  circumstance — the  fact 
that  as  a  child  he  lived  in  a  warm  cUmate.  ILate 
in  the  year  1823  the  Cloughs  removed  from  Liver- 
pool to  Charleston,  South  Carolina,  which  was  their 
home  for  some  thirteen  years.  Arthur  retiurned  to 
England  in  1828  to  enter  school.  He  was  in  Charles- 
ton therefore  from  his  fourth  to  his  tenth  year. 
The  summers  during  this  period  were  spent  by  the 
Cloughs  either  in  the  North,  or,  very  pleasantly, 
we  are  told,  on  SuUi van's  Island  out  in  the  bay. 
Under  these  conditions  the  Charleston  climate  would 
have  to  be  very  hot  indeed  to  explain  much  in  the 
poet's  matured  character. 


10  ARTHUR   HUGH  CLOUGH 

For  the  Memoir  prefixed  to  the  1869  edition  of  the 
Poems,  Anne  Jemima  Clough  supplied  some  recollec- 
tions of  this  period  of  her  brother's  life.  This  is  the 
Miss  Clough  who  became,  in  1871,  the  first  Principal 
of  Newnham  College,  Cambridge.  The  family  lived 
at  Charleston,  she  says,  in  "  a  large,  ugly,  red -brick 
house  "  on  the  East  Bay.  The  father  had  his  office 
on  the  ground  floor  of  the  building.  His  visitors 
were  planters  from  the  river  and  captains  of  sailing 
vessels,  and  his  premises  were  piled  with  bagging  and 
twine  and  cotton.  From  their  nursery  windows  the 
children  could  watch  the  ships  standing  at  the 
wharves,  and  passing  in  and  out  of  the  bay.  They 
would  have  had  to  be  very  prosaic  children  not  to 
find  their  surroundings  rich  in  the  materials  of 
wonder  and  make-believe.  It  is  a  little  singular 
that  the  one  of  them  presumably  the  most  sensitive, 
the  poet  to  be,  never  voiced,  in  his  later  writings, 
any  recollection  of  these  unusual  scenes  of  his  child- 
hood. 

But  the  Cloughs  "  were  very  English,"  as  one  of 
their  descendants  remarks,  and  especially  English 
in  the  first  five  years  of  their  stay  in  South 
Carolina,  the  years  before  the  two  elder  boys  went 
back  to  England  to  school.  They  did  not  allow 
their  children  to  go  to  any  of  the  local  schools,  nor 
help  them  to  make  friends  with  the  American  chil- 
dren. Mrs.  Clough  made  no  effort  to  become  ac- 
quainted with  the  people  of  the  city.  She  reminded 
her  son  continually  that  he  was  a  Briton  ;   toward 


CHILDHOOD  II 

American  traditions  she  created  in  her  home  an 
attitude  of  indifference  rather  than  of  sympathy  or 
active  hostility,  either  of  which  would  have  stimu- 
lated a  small  boy's  curiosity  concerning  the  pic- 
turesque scenes  and  people  about  him.  Being  very 
loyal  to  his  mother,  and  very  receptive  to  her  sug- 
gestions, Arthur  stayed  in  her  room  and  read  about 
English  sea  captains  of  the  past,  instead  of  lingering 
about  his  father's  office  to  admire  living  American 
sea  captains.  And  so — to  speak  in  a  dangerously 
serious  way  of  the  responsibilities  of  a  child — missing 
the  romance  and  the  humour  that  were  close  about 
him  in  this  first  environment  he  confronted,  this 
child  established  a  fair  likelihood  that  if  he  ever 
became  a  poet,  his  poetry  would  be  chiefly  remark- 
able for  other  riches  than  romance  or  humour. 

Arthur  Clough  at  seven,  in  his  sister's  account,  is 
"  a  beautiful  boy,  with  soft,  silky,  almost  black 
hair,  and  shining  dark  eyes,  and  a  small  delicate 
mouth."  He  reads  a  great  deal,  is  passionate,  but 
obstinate  rather  than  easily  roused,  and  is  too  fas- 
tidious to  go  barefooted.  He  studies  history  and 
books  of  travel  with  his  mother,  and  is  accustomed  to 
"  do  sums  in  the  office,  lying  on  the  piled-up  pieces 
of  cotton  bagging." 

During  these  years  the  father  was  frequently 
away  on  business,  and  Arthur,  his  sister  tells,  came 
to  be  his  mother's  constant  companion.  "  She 
poured  out  the  fullness  of  her  heart  on  him."  Her 
influence  on  him  was  great.     She  was  very  religious, 


12  AI^THUR   HUGH  CLOUGH 

and  spoke  to  her  children  early  and  late  about  God 
and  about  Duty.  She  strove  to  inculcate  in  them 
her  own  enthusiasm  for  all  that  was  noble  and  other- 
worldly. Her  attachments  were  few  and  of  great 
strength.  She  was  very  affectionate,  and  clinging, 
and  womanly.  Her  influence,  in  short,  was  of  pre- 
cisely the  sort  to  make  a  conscientious  and  idealistic 
boy  quite  too  conscientious  and  idealistic.  The 
really  remarkable  thing  about  this  influence  was  that 
it  was  direct  and  positive.  Many  a  similarly  pious 
nineteenth  century  mother  succeeded  in  implanting 
in  the  breast  of  a  similarly  sensitive  son  a  fierce 
ambition  to  become  as  hard  as  nails.  The  difference 
in  the  case  of  Mrs.  Clough  and  her  son  was  mainly 
that  she  had  him  to  herself,  without  much  inter- 
ference from  his  father,  or  from  relatives  and  friends  ; 
but  partly  too,  perhaps,  that  the  attraction  between 
them  was  especially  strong.  One  result  of  all  this 
was  that  when  the  family  went  to  visit  its  cousins, 
on  its  return  to  England,  Arthur,  in  the  words  of 
his  sister,  "  could  not  enter  into  the  boys'  rough 
games  and  amusements."  It  is  a  frequent  circum- 
stance in  the  childhood  of  poets,  so  frequent  that  to 
regret  it  would  almost  be  to  regret  poets. 

Clough 's  father  seems  to  have  been  a  cheerful 
and  active,  though  not  uniformly  successful,  business 
man,  very  affectionate  toward  his  family,  with  a 
lively  interest  in  the  surface  of  things,  and  no  interest 
at  all  in  what  lay  beneath  the  smrface.  He  cared 
much  for  company  and  httle  for  books.     He  had 


CHILDHOOD  13 

great  zest  for  doing  things  and  for  moving  about. 
His  inclinations  in  these  matters  were  quite  the 
opposite  of  his  wife's.  And  though  it  was  the 
mother's  tendency  that  relatives  and  friends  were 
accustomed  to  find  dominant  in  Arthur,  they  found 
something  of  his  father  in  him  also.  A  zest  for 
doing  things  was  certainly  characteristic  of  Clough 
the  schoolboy,  though  it  was  to  disappear  from 
Clough  the  undergraduate.  His  sister  felt  that  in 
his  later  years  he  came  to  resemble  their  father  very 
decidedly.  His  liking  for  the  passing  show,  his  tact, 
and  his  constant  watchfulness  for  the  comfort  of 
those  about  him,  are  qualities  she  ascribes  to  the 
paternal  influence.  But  whatever  may  be  true  of 
the  adult  Clough,  the  small  boy  was  certainly  his 
mother's  son  much  more  than  his  father's.  This  is 
true,  doubtless,  of  most  boys.  But  it  was  excep- 
tionally true  of  Clough.  ' 

In  June  1828  the  Cloughs  made  a  journey  to  Eng- 
land. When  the  rest  of  the  family  returned  to 
America  in  October,  they  left  Arthur  and  his  elder 
brother,  Charles,  in  a  school  in  Chester.  Here  they 
remained  until  the  summer  of  the  next  year,  when 
they  both  entered  Rugby.  A  letter  written  by  Arthur 
to  his  sister  from  the  Chester  school  attests  the  asso- 
ciation in  the  youthful  mind  of  a  pictorial  talent 
and  a  taste  for  sensation  with  a  breadth  of  interest 
truly  Baconian.  "  During  the  Easter  holidays," 
it  runs,  "  I  had  plenty  of  leisure  for  drawing.  Two 
men  were  hung  here  lately  for  robbing  an  old  clergy- 


14  ARTHUR   HUGH   CLOUGH 

man.  We  have  bought  a  book  entitled  The  New- 
tonian System  of  Philosophy,  which  treats  chiefly 
of  the  power  and  weight  of  air ;  the  cause  of  volcanoes, 
earthquakes,  and  other  phenomena  of  nature,  such 
as  lightning,  the  aurora  boreaUs  ;  also  a  description 
of  the  sun,  planets,  their  moons  or  satellites,  con- 
stellations, comets,  and  other  heavenly  bodies ; 
likewise  of  air-guns,  balloons,  air-pumps  ;  also  a 
very  pleasing  one  of  snow,  hail,  and  vapours.  It  also 
describes  electricity  and  magnetism,  and  gives  a 
brief  account  of  minerals,  vegetables,  and  animals." 
How  much  the  account  of  the  book  sounds  as  if 
Bacon  himself  were  describing  a  notable  publication 
of  his  House  of  Saloman  !  And  sounding  like  the 
sagest  science  of  an  earlier  age,  how  childish,  too, 
it  sounds  !  Here  is  the  gust  of  childhood  for  the  last 
time  in  anything  we  have  of  Clough's  until  The 
Bothie,  written  in  the  zest  of  hoUday  release  from 
academic  walls,  twenty  years  later.  For  in  the 
eleventh  year  of  his  childhood,  Clough  was  turned 
over  to  Arnold  of  Rugby,  to  be  kindly  and  firmly 
and  prematurely  inducted  into  manhood. 


CHAPTER  II 
AT  RUGBY 

WHEN  the  Clough  boys  were  entered  at  Rugby, 
Dr.  Arnold  had  been  there  only  a  year,  and 
had  just  begun  the  work  of  his  reform.  It  has  always 
been  agreed  that  this  reform  wrought  a  transforma- 
tion in  English  pubHc  life.  It  is  not  so  clearly 
appreciated  that  the  actual  changes  in  school  organi- 
zation and  curriculum  which  it  involved  were  few 
and  slight.  An  increase  of  pay  for  assistant  masters, 
with  a  corresponding  increase  in  school  fees,  a  little 
more  of  modem  history  and  English  literature  in  the 
course  of  study,  the  recognition  of  the  old  fagging 
system  as  a  regular  means  of  discipline — these  were 
the  main,  and  almost  the  only,  changes  in  the  outer 
constitution  of  the  school.  The  great  change  was  a 
change  of  spirit.  Arnold  insisted  before  anything 
else  on  building  character  in t  o  his  charges .  Boys  will 
be  boys,  had  been  the  reflection  of  previous  school- 
masters ;  but  Arnold  remembered  that  boys  would 
be  men.  The  old  rules  and  the  old  punishments 
were  perfunctory  ;  they  rested  on  a  dim  feeling  that 
restrictions  and  beatings  were  a  wholesome  element 
in  boy   routine.    Arnold   punished  severely  if  he 

15 


l6  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

punished  at  all,  and  always  with  a  clear  view  of 
some  benefit  to  be  secured.  He  resolutely  expelled 
boys  of  whose  moral  influence  he  was  dubious. 
Those  that  stayed  he  laboured  to  place  beyond  the 
necessity  of  punishment,  by  forcing  the  growth  in 
them  of  conscience  and  self-control. 

It  was  a  task  of  leadership  more  than  of  command 
which  Arnold  had  set  himself,  and  he  brought  genius 
to  the  performance  of  it.  He  really  succeeded  in 
breaking  down  the  long-standing  hostility  between 
boys  and  masters.  He  really  brought  his  boys  to 
the  point  of  imitating  his  own  character  and  conduct, 
and  even  to  the  farther  point  of  thinking  as  he  did 
about  the  duties  and  opportunities  of  the  school. 

Arthur  Clough  went  to  Rugby,  his  sister  writes, 
"  a  somewhat  grave  and  studious  boy,  not  without 
tastes  for  walking,  shooting,  and  sight-seeing,  but 
with  little  capacity  for  play  and  for  mixing  with 
others."  Life  in  the  school  made  up  the  first,  and 
in  great  part  the  second,  of  these  deficiencies. 
Clough  acquired  skill  at  the  Rugby  games,  and  he 
made  friends.  In  athletics  his  record  is  not  merely 
of  the  kind  so  frequently  pieced  out  for  boys  who 
are  really  not  so  titanic  or  so  agile  as  they  might 
have  been.  No  less  thoroughly  competent  an 
authority  than  the  author  of  Tom  Brown's  Schooldays 
asserts  that  at  the  queen  of  the  Rugby  games  Clough 
was  the  best  goal-keeper  of  his  day  ;  but  he  adds  that, 
though  he  swam  well  too,  Clough  did  not  take  a 
prominent  part  in  games.    Other  authorities  ar« 


AT  RUGBY  17 

less  inclined  to  minimize  Clough's  prowess.  William 
D.  Arnold,  for  instance,  in  a  pamphlet,  of  interest 
to  Rugbeians,  called  Football  :  the  Sixth  Match, 
says  something  of  the  work  of  the  forward  and 
centre  positions  in  the  game,  and  then  :  "  Lastly 
there  are  those  who  feel  that  keeping  goal,  defending 
the  very  crown  of  conquest,  is  no  mean  or  unworthy 
task,  since  beneath  those  very  bars  were  given  to 
immortality  the  names  of  Clough  and  Harry  Thorpe." 
Clough's  name  stands  on  the  athletic  roll  of  honour 
in  the  further  capacity  of  first  recorded  winner  of  the 
"  Barbey  Hill  Run,"  the  oldest  of  the  official  runs 
of  the  school.  But  of  course  the  games  of  Rugby 
and  the  winners  in  them  were  numerous.  Clough's 
accomplishment  at  sports,  it  may  be  concluded,  was 
up  to  the  average,  and  not  above  it. 

Clough's  friends  at  Rugby  were  nearly  all  men  who 
later  went  into  the  Church,  and  attained  more  or 
less  prominence  as  upholders  of  latitudinarian  ideas. 
One  who  looks  through  the  Rugby  roll  of  the  years 
of  Arnold's  mastership  is  struck  by  the  fact  that  it 
divides  itself  almost  half  and  half  into  soldiers  and 
clergymen.  The  other  callings  are  but  thinly  repre- 
sented. Of  the  soldiers  there  are  not  a  few  that 
made  themselves  famous  in  the  Crimean  War.  Not 
one  of  them  is  represented  as  a  correspondent  or  even 
by  mention  in  the  volume  of  Clough's  letters.  They, 
presumably,  were  the  less  sensitive  members  of 
the  school,  who  indeed  also  received  Arnold's  in- 
spiration toward  devotion  to  duty,  but  only  in  such 


i8  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

measure  as  left  unimpaired  the  vigorous  life  of 
instinct  and  of  impulse.  These  constituted  Clough's 
opportunities  for  farming  friendships  outside  the 
limits  of  the  one  way  of  taking  life  in  which  he  had 
been  brought  up.  And  he  failed  to  avail  himself 
of  them. 

Of  the  men  older  than  himself  that  he  knew  well 
the  strongest  personalities  were  presumably  three 
men  who  were  later  to  become  deans  of  cathedrals. 
Arthur  P.  Stanley,  though  he  entered  Rugby  six 
months  later  than  Clough,  was  his  senior  by  three 
years.  In  later  years  both  the  poet  and  the 
Dean  of  Westminster  testified  to  a  high  mutual 
esteem  ;  in  schooldays  the  admiration  must  have 
been  mainly  on  the  side  of  Clough.  That  the  two 
made  much  the  same  kind  of  impression  on  their 
schoolmates  appears  from  the  circumstance  that 
while  the  boy  Arthur  in  Tom  Brown's  Schooldays 
has  generally  been  taken  as  a  portrait  of  Stanley, 
a  number  of  contemporary  Rugbeians  thought  that 
Clough  was  the  author's  model.  Still  other 
"  Arthurs,"  except  in  name,  must  C.  J.  Vaughan 
and  W.  C.  Lake  have  been,  lifelong  disciples  of 
Arnold  both,  Vaughan  as  Headmaster  of  Harrow, 
Master  of  the  Temple,  and  Dean  of  Llandaff,  succes- 
sively^  and  Lake  as  Dean  of  Durham.  Boys  of  less 
brilliant  futures,  but  doubtless  equal  purity  of 
character,  and  dear  friends  of  Clough,  were  Thomas 
Burbidge,  J.  P.  Gell,  and  J.  N.  Simpkinson.  Bur- 
bidge  went  to  Aberdeen   University  and  then  to 


AT  RUGBY  19 

Cambridge,  was  Master  of  Leamington  College  for 
a  time,  and  then  for  many  years  a  chaplain  of  Eng- 
lish congregations  in  the  cities  of  the  Mediterranean. 
It  was  with  him  that  Clough  joined  in  the  publica- 
tion of  Ambarvalia,  in  1848.  Gell  and  Simpkinson 
became  Trinity  men  at  Cambridge,  taught  for  a  time, 
Gell  in  Tasmania  and  Simpkinson  at  Harrow,  and 
concluded  their  lives  as  rectors  of  churches  respec- 
tively in  London  and  in  the  country.  Of  younger 
friends  the  most  noteworthy  are  the  Arnold  boys, 
Matthew  and  Thomas.  They  entered  their  father's 
school  only  in  the  summer  preceding  Clough' s  last 
year  of  residence,  but  he  had  known  them  well  before 
that  time  while  they  were  living  at  home,  and 
during  vacations  from  their  earlier  schooling  at 
Winchester.  With  the  Arnold  boys  is  associated 
Theodore  Walrond,  an  attractive  boy  from  the 
North,  well-loved  though  not  fated  to  accomplish 
any  memorable  work  in  the  world. 

This,  practically,  is  the  list  of  Clough' s  intimate 
companions  at  school.  It  is  remarkable  for  the 
brilliancy  it  comprises,  but  still  more  remarkable 
for  its  homogeneity.  To  at  least  three  of  the  number 
has  been  applied  the  epithet  "  Doctor  Arnold's 
favourite  pupil."  They  were  all  boys  after  his  heart 
— boys  also  of  just  the  kind  Mrs.  Clough  would  have 
chosen  as  associates  for  her  son. 

In  addition  to  his  intimates  Clough  had  a  great 
number  of  admiring  acquaintances.  We  are  told 
that  he  was  the  most  prominent  boy  in  the  school  in 


20  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

his  last  year,  and  that  when  he  left  nearly  every  boy 
in  Rugby  shook  him  by  the  hand.  In  the  light 
of  a  letter  which  he  wrote  in  the  next  to  the  last  year 
of  his  residence,  it  is  perhaps  not  wholly  cynical  to 
suggest  that  this  ovation  awarded  to  his  departure 
may  have  rested  on  some  confusion  of  motives.  He 
complains  in  this  letter  that  he  is  "  of  necessity 
thrown  much  with  other  fellows,  and  wishing  now 
most  earnestly  to  know  as  many  as  possible  ;  for 
there  is  a  deal  of  evil  springing  up  in  the  school, 
and  it  is  to  be  feared  that  the  tares  will  choke  much 
of  the  wheat."  It  is  conceivable  that  many  a  palp- 
able tare  was  amiable  on  the  occasion  of  Clough's 
leaving  from  a  feeling  that  saying  farewell  to  him 
was  not  after  all  immeasurably  less  satisfactory  than 
choking  him  would  have  been.  \^ 

For  it  was  undoubtedly  possible,  then  as  now,  to 
look  upon  the  schoolboy  Clough  as  a  prig.  He  was 
saved  from  the  more  serious  degrees  of  priggishness 
by  the  honesty  and  wholeheartedness  and  unselfish- 
ness with  which  he  plunged  into  the  life  of  the  school. 
He  played  his  games  with  a  little  more  of  Dr.  Arnold's 
own  consciousness  of  the  moral  value  of  athletic 
exercises  than  comports  with  the  ideal  of  care-free, 
joyous  youth  ;  yet  he  played  them  zealously  and 
well. 

He  had  a  stronger  and  more  spontaneous  interest 
in  his  studies,  and  was  remarkably  successful  in 
them.  Before  he  was  fourteen  he  won  the  only 
scholarship    the    school    afforded.    He    progressed 


AT   RUGBY  zi 

rapidly  through  the  forms,  until  he  had  to  wait  a 
year  to  get  into  the  sixth,  because  he  was  under  the 
age  limit  for  it.  In  his  various  classes  he  was  winning 
prizes  continually  :  in  a  single  letter  to  his  mother 
he  is  likely  to  mention  as  many  as  five  or  six  new 
ones.  Toward  the  end  of  his  next  to  last  year  he 
writes  her  :  "As  for  the  prizes,  I  have  this  Easter 
got  one,  the  Latin  verse  ;  and  a  second  for  each  of 
the  others,  viz.  the  Latin  prose  and  the  Greek  verse, 
so  that  I  shall  still  have  two  to  try  for  next  year ; 
so  that,  of  course,  I  am  very  well  satisfied."  In 
pursuits  corresponding  to  our  "  student  activities  " 
of  to-day,  he  was  equally  successful.  He  held  what 
administrative  offices  there  were,  and  was  editor 
and  chief  contributor  of  the  Rugby  Magazine, 

But  the  most  significant  thing  about  Rugby  life 
for  Clough  was  that  it  provided  such  a  perfect 
hotbed  for  fostering  the  preoccupation  with  morality 
and  religion  implanted  in  him  by  his  mother.  Here 
as  at  home  he  lived  under  constant  incitement  to 
emulate  the  loftiest  models  of  Christian  conduct. 
The  atmosphere  of  the  school  differed  from  that  of  the 
home  chiefly,  perhaps,  in  that  it  inculcated  a  respon- 
sibility for  the  actions  of  others  than  oneself.  Be- 
cause he  was  early  singled  out  as  desirable  material 
for  leadership,  Clough  was  particularly  encouraged 
by  Dr.  Arnold  to  assume  an  intense  feeling  of  account- 
ability for  the  morals  of  the  entire  school.  He  was 
Arnold's  favourite  as  distinctly  as  he  had  been  his 
mother's  favourite.     Matthew  Arnold's  elder  brother 


22  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

Thomas  writes  that  Clough  spent  much  of  his 
time  in  the  private  part  of  the  master's  house.  He 
was  made  especially  welcome  there  "  by  his  gentle- 
ness and  sincerity."  He  was  thus  exposed  more 
completely  even  than  Arnold's  own  partly  Wyke- 
hamist sons,  to  the  powerful  personal  influence  of  a 
man  whose  chief  defect  as  a  schoolmaster  was  that 
he  failed  to  appreciate  the  utterly  different  effects 
his  system  would  have  on  the  ordinary  "  roundabout 
boy,"  and  on  a  boy  like  Clough — or  else  that  he 
really  believed  such  a  morally  over-trained  product 
as  Clough  was  when  he  left  for  Oxford  was  the 
proper  end  of  pubhc-school  training. 

The  schoolboy  letters  of  Clough  that  have  been 
preserved  were  nearly  all  written  in  the  last  two 
years  of  his  residence  ;  and  they  show  clearly  that 
at  any  rate  in  that  final  period  he  considered  him- 
self as  on  the  side  rather  of  the  masters  than  of  the 
pupils.  He  is  continually  writing  to  his  friends 
sentiments  that  would  be  unendurably  priggish 
if  they  were  not  so  admirably  and  pathetically 
sincere — such  things  as  this  :  "I  verily  beUeve  my 
whole  being  is  soaked  through  with  the  wishing 
and  hoping  and  striving  to  do  the  school  good,  or 
rather  to  keep  it  up  and  hinder  it  from  falling  in 
this,  I  do  think,  very  critical  time,  so  that  all  my 
cares  and  affections  and  conversations,  thoughts, 
words,  and  deeds,  look  to  that  involuntarily." 

The  crisis  Clough  refers  to  is  apparently  the  Tory 
attack    on   the    Broad  Church    principles,   on  the 


AT   RUGBY  33 

peculiarly  effective  discipline,  and  on  what  was  taken 
to  be  the  goody-goodiness  of  Rugby.  For  a  time 
the  weight  of  this  attack  was  shown  in  a  decided 
falling  off  in  attendance.  The  situation  may  well 
have  seemed  critical  to  those  who  believed  that  the 
fate  of  a  reform  very  badly  needed  not  only  by  Rugby 
but  by  all  the  English  public  schools  was  hanging 
in  the  balance.  Fate  decided,  of  course,  in  favour 
of  Arnold.  The  superiority  of  the  clean-living  and 
industrious  Rugbeian  to  the  slack  and  irreverent 
product  of  the  other  schools  became  very  obvious 
when  they  met  together  as  freshmen  at  the  Uni- 
versities. Among  the  rivals  and  opponents  of  Dr. 
Arnold  who  recognized  the  excellence  of  the  men  he 
made  is  Cardinal  Newman,  who  says,  in  the  Apologia, 
of  the  iBroad  Church  movement :  "  The  party  grew 
all  the  time  that  I  was  in  Oxford,  even  in  numbers, 
certainly  in  breadth  and  definiteness  of  doctrine,  and 
in  power.  And,  what  was  a  far  higher  consideration, 
by  the  accession  of  Dr.  Arnold's  pupils,  it  was  invested 
with  an  elevation  of  character  which  claimed  the  re- 
spect even  of  its  opponents."  Such  men  as  Vaughan 
and  Stanley  and  Lake,  with  others  as  substantial  if 
less  distinguished,  were  a  sufficient  answer  to  the 
charges  levied  against  the  system  that  produced 
them  ;  and  within  a  few  years  the  important  elements 
of  the  Rugby  system  were  in  highly  advantageous 
operation  in  Eton  and  Harrow  and  Westminster  and 
Winchester. 
It  was  a  really  great  reform,  and  Clough,  young  as 


24  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

he  was,  seems  to  have  been  fully  aware  of  its  signi- 
ficance. And  to  him  must  go  at  least  so  much  credit 
for  the  result  as  belongs  to  the  best  of  a  small  set  of 
highly  efficient  tools.  It  was  in  his  favour  that  Dr. 
Arnold  broke  his  rule  of  delivering  prizes  with  no 
comment,  congratulating  him  publicly  on  having 
won  every  Rugby  honour,  and  on  having  served  his 
school  well.  In  him  Dr.  Arnold  found  a  servant 
ready  to  subject  his  own  will  completely,  able  to 
win  the  leadership  of  the  school,  and  desirous  of 
using  that  leadership  to  no  other  end  than  the  fur- 
therance of  his  master's  purposes.  To  keep  up  a 
favourable  spirit  in  the  school  was,  of  course,  the 
very  essence  of  Dr.  Arnold's  success.  It  is  almost 
possible  to  suspect  that  a  little  of  the  spirit  of  re- 
bellion in  Clough  might  have  sealed  the  doom  of  the 
Rugby  experiment.  However  disastrous  this  dash 
of  rebelliousness  might  have  been  to  the  course  of 
education  and  morality  in  England,  it  would,  per- 
haps, have  been  an  excellent  thing  in  the  long  run 
for  the  happiness,  the  individuality,  and  thcpoetical 
quality  of  Clough. 

Assuming  that  Clough  was  destined  from  the  first 
to  become  a  poet,  and  a  moral  poet,  it  might  be 
supposed  that  the  strong  and  delightful  moral  atmo- 
sphere of  Rugby  was  peculiarly  favourable  to  his 
poetical  development.  But  it  is  a  principle  of  re- 
pulsion that  operates  in  such  cases  more  frequently 
than  a  principle  of  attraction.  A  sensitive  youth  is 
more  likely  to  be  driven  into  poetry  by  uncongenial. 


AT  RUGBY  25 

than  led  into  it  by  congenial,  circumstances.  When 
he  can  see  his  ideals  being  actively  striven  after 
by  his  community  he  is  likely  to  join  in  the  struggle 
rather  than  to  stand  off  and  meditate  those  ideals 
and  vent  in  mere  song  the  emotions  to  which  they 
give  rise.  When  his  outer  life  is  such  that  the  boy's 
heart  can  be  in  it,  the  demand  of  his  inner  life  for 
expression,  for  lyrical  outpouring,  will  probably 
not  be  insistent,  nor  even  genuine. 

Clough's  life  at  Rugby  is  a  splendid  record  of 
youthful  steadiness  and  purpose  and  energy,  but  it 
is  a  better  explanation  how  to  hinder  than  how  to 
promote  the  education  of  a  poet.  He  was  in  com- 
pletest  measure  the  prize  schoolboy  ;  but  he  is  alone 
among  English  poets  in  having  enjoyed  that  dis- 
tinction. For  the  development  even  of  the  classical 
poet,  the  Pope  or  the  Johnson,  some  principle  of 
isolation  is  necessary,  some  occasion  for  the  awaken- 
ing of  individual  perceptions  and  ideas  distinct  from 
the  ideas  and  perceptions  of  the  community.  There 
is  not  much  detachment  in  the  usual  boy's  life,  but 
detachment  is  essential  to  the  life  of  the  boy  who  is 
to  be  a  poet.  A  number  of  Clough's  contemporaries 
considered  that  his  adolescence  was  greatly  prolonged 
— or  better,  long  interrupted.  He  was  more  a  boy 
when  he  left  than  when  he  entered  Oxford.  And 
it  was  at  Oxford  that  he  learned  to  separate  him- 
self from  those  about  him.  But  at  Rugby  he 
was  interested  in  the  community  life  to  the  point 
of  being  completely  fused  in  it.     His  loyalty  to  the 


26  ARTHUR   HUGH   CLOUGH 

school  was  complete  ;  and  everything  he  did  and  said 
was  an  expression,  not  properly  of  himself,  but  of 
this  loyalty. 

His  school-life  was  remarkable  in  precisely  con- 
trary respects  to  those  in  which  we  are  accustomed 
to  find  the  school-lives  of  poets  remarkable.  It 
was  not  rebelHous,  we  have  said,  like  Shelley's  or 
Byron's ;  nor  shrinking  and  self-contained,  like 
Coleridge's  ;  nor  lighted  up  by  enthusiasm  for  poetry, 
like  Keats's  ;  nor  largely  taken  up  with  day-dream- 
ing, like  the  life  of  almost  any  other  poet  than  him- 
self that  might  be  named. 

With  most  young  poets,  reading  at  sweet  will 
has  been  the  main  road  to  the  detachment  necessary 
to  the  artist.  But  there  is  nothing  to  show  that 
Clough  found  much  time  out  of  school  hours  for 
browsing  in  a  library.  The  only  pubHcations  men- 
tioned in  the  letters  from  Rugby,  the  reading  of  which 
cannot  be  taken  to  have  been  obligatory,  are  three 
newspapers  and  Knight's  Quarterly.  Perhaps  Clough 
read  more  during  his  earher,  less  responsible  years 
at  school.  His  sister  speaks  of  his  rushing  to  show 
his  mother  the  delightful  discovery  he  had  made  of 
Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets.  This  was  in  183 1, 
when  he  was  still  in  the  period  of  his  childhood 
enjoyment  of  Scott  and  Robertson  and  Pope's 
Homer.  Later  his  love  of  reading  seems  to  have 
vanished  along  with  his  other  impulses  under  the 
shadow  of  his  all-subduing  sense  of  duty. 

One   kind   of   detachment    Clough    attained    at 


AT  RUGBY  37 

Rugby,  and  that  is  moral  detachment.  Milton's 
youth  proves  that  it  is  possible  to  combine  this 
detachment  of  the  moralist  with  the  detachment 
that  springs  from  a  keen  perception  of  beauty. 
But  in  Milton's  youth  beauty  came  first,  which  is 
as  it  should  be  in  the  youth  of  a  poet,  but  is  not 
as  it  was  in  the  youth  of  Clough.  Wordsworth 
too  effected  a  reconciliation  of  the  two  things  ; 
but  Wordsworth  had  the  useful  conviction  that  he 
could  best  learn  morality  from  the  trees,  which  are 
very  beautiful,  whereas  Clough  was  persuaded  that 
he  could  best  learn  morality  from  Dr.  Arnold,  who 
unfortunately  was  not  nearly  so  beautiful  as  he  was 
good.  With  the  young  Wordsworth  and  the  young 
Milton  morality  was  a  matter  more  of  reflection  than 
of  getting  things  done — and  reflection  shades  off 
easily  and  naturally  into  imagination.  But  not  so, 
getting  things  done.  Give  a  strong  sense  of  duty, 
many  things  to  do,  and  the  exercise  of  the  imagina- 
tion becomes  at  once  a  wasteful  sin.  This  is  just 
what  happened  in  the  case  of  the  Rugbeian  Clough  : 
he  was  robbed  of  all  opportunity  for  building  his 
castles  in  Spain,  for  creating  for  himself 

"  Such  sights  as  youthful  Poets  dream 
On  summer  eves  by  haunted  stream." 

He  literally  had  no  time  for  the  "  wish-thinking  " 
which  modern  psychology  says  is  the  making  of  the 
painter,  the  musician,  and  the  poet.  The  country 
about  Rugby,  though  not  so  beautiful  as  that 
about  Horton  or  Grasmere,  is  yet  much  the  same 


38  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

country  as  that  about  Stratford-on-Avon ;  but 
Clough  had  no  time  to  look  at  it.  There  was 
beauty  in  the  high  spirits  of  wayward  Rugby  boys ; 
but  Clough  was  set  at  looking  out  vigilantly  for 
every  least  appearance  of  evil  in  this  quarter. 
His  vacations  afforded  beautiful  cousins  as  well 
as  beautiful  scenes,  and  stirred  in  him  strange 
emotions.  But  so  far  were  these  emotions  from 
having  the  right  of  way  in  his  life,\that  they  were 
only  made  serviceable  for  beauty,  taken  up  as 
themes  for  poetry,  when  they  had  been  mellowed 
by  the  passage  of  twenty-five  years. 

Almost  as  striking  as  the  absence  from  the  Rugby 
letters  of  a  concern  about  beauty,  is  the  absence  of 
any  sign  of  wit  or  humour.  There  is  only  one  slip  in 
the  direction  of  pleasantry,  and  that  is  immediately 
exposed  to  publicity  and  apologized  for.  This  is 
the  line  :  "  The  kind  of  passive  and  almost  apathetic 

feeling  (to  indulge  in  a  bull) "    This  is  the 

nearest  approach  to  a  joke. 

Also  notable  is  the  absence  of  any  mark  of  inter- 
est in  the  doings  of  the  outside  world.  Clough 's 
thoughts  fly  half-way  over  the  Rugby  walls  in  con- 
nection with  the  ecclesiastical  and  educational 
controversies  of  Dr.  Arnold ;  and  he  is  interested 
toward  the  last  in  Oxford  and  Cambridge  as  rival 
entertainers  of  Rugby  men.  When  men  at  the  uni- 
versities come  back  to  visit,  he  is  attracted  not  by 
their  travellers'  tales  but  by  their  comments  on  the 
school.     "  It  is  very  fine  and  striking,"  he  says,  "  to 


AT  RUGBY  29 

see  many  of  the  best  and  cleverest  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge men  still  watching  with  great  interest  all  the 
little  changes  in  the  school,  and  still  helping  those 
that  remain  with  their  experience  and  wisdom." 
And  when  the  time  finally  comes  for  his  own  depar- 
ture, he  is  only  consoled  by  the  reflection,  *'  that 
Dr.  Arnold  will  be  a  bishop  before  long." 

The  experience,  then,  which  Clough  spent  the 
most  susceptible  years  of  his  life  in  storing  up,  was 
mainly  of  one  sole  kind,  not  of  many  kinds.  At  the 
time  when  it  was  most  natural  and  most  important 
for  his  mind  to  be  wide  open,  he  kept  it  three-quarters 
closed — or  if  conduct  really  is  three-fourths  of  life, 
then  one-quarter  closed.  He  learned  too  early, 
for  artistic  purposes,  to  regulate  and  analyse  his 
thoughts.  In  part  deliberately  and  in  part  through 
preoccupation  he  limited  narrowly  the  range  of  his 
curiosity  in  people  and  things.  So  doing  made  it 
very  difficult  for  him  ever  to  come  to  really  close 
grips  with  certain  large  classes  of  thoughts  and  de- 
sires. Against  the  ravages  of  later  introspection 
he  stored  the  larder  with  far  too  limited  a  range  of 
foods.  Connections  which  youthful  intuition  might 
have  taken  in  at  a  glance,  if  given  the  opportunity, 
he  was  later  compelled  to  puzzle  out  at  vast  expense 
of  middle-age  reasoning.  The  sympathies  of  his 
adult  years,  wide  as  earth  in  the  number  of  persons 
they  touched,  were  yet  narrow  in  that  they  touched 
most  of  those  persons  only  at  one  or  two  points. 
A   rather   bitter   awareness   of   this   limitation   is 


/ 

30  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

back  of  the  lines  in  the  Second  Part  of  Dipsychus, 
in  which  the  retiring  Chief  Justice  is  described 
by  one  of  the  barristers  : 

"  He  was  a  moral  sort  of  prig,  I've  heard, 
Till  he  was  twenty-five  ;    and  even  then 
He  never  entered  into  life  as  most  men. 
That  is  the  reason  why  he  fails  so  soon." 

Considerably  more  natural  and  youthful  seem  to 
have  been  Clough's  activities  in  his  vacations. 
Except  for  the  summer  of  1833,  and  his  last  year, 
he  was  separated  from  his  family  during  his  school- 
days by  the  width  of  the  Atlantic.  But  he  had  many 
relatives  in  England  and  in  Wales,  and  he  visited 
about  among  these,  very  welcome,  it  appears,  and 
for  the  most  part  very  happy.  In  the  last  year 
of  his  life,  he  turned  back  to  this  part  of  his  experi- 
ence for  the  subject  matter  of  "  Primitiae,"  the  best  of 
the  tales  in  Mari  Magno.  It  is  a  happy  little  story 
in  the  main,  but  with  a  rather  pathetic  reminis- 
cence of  upper-form  preoccupation  with  books 
and  problems  breaking  in  destructively  on  the  easy 
and  affectionate  relations  previously  estabUshed 
with  charming  young  cousins.  It  is  pretty  certainly 
to  these  vacations  that  Clough  owes  the  first  spring- 
ing in  him  of  a  more  humorous  and  critical  and 
worldly  self.  This  summer  Clough  was  in  complete 
subjection  through  school  and  college  to  the  Rugbeian 
winter  Clough,  and  indeed  never  completely 
triumphed  over  him,  effecting  at  best  an  equal 
partnership,  if  not  a  fusion,  in  the  poet's  last  years. 


AT  RUGBY  31 

In  1836  the  Clough  family  moved  from  Charleston 
back  to  Liverpool.  Arthur  Hugh  with  fervid  elo- 
quence poured  out  before  his  parents  the  liberal 
ideas  he  had  been  imbibing  from  Dr.  Arnold.  And 
they,  being  Tories,  regretted  at  times  that  they  had 
not  sent  their  son  to  Shrewsbury.  But  they  were 
proud  of  him,  and  vastly  content  with  his  Rugby 
successes.  His  sister  renewed  at  this  time  the  love 
for  him,  amounting  to  veneration,  that  was  the  great 
emotional  experience  of  her  long  and  useful  life. 
He  was  almost  equally  fond  of  her,  and  delighted  in 
sharing  his  enthusiasms  with  her,  and  inspiring  her 
with  his  own  and  Dr.  Arnold's  great  ambition  to  do 
good  work  in  the  wprld. 

What  has  previously  been  said  about  the  school- 
boy dough's  lack  of  the  earmarks  of  the  artist  takes 
no  account  of  the  undisputed  fact  that  he  wrote 
while  he  was  at  Rugby  a  certain  quantity  of  verse. 
The  Memoir  states  that  in  his  first  year  at  school  "  he 
was  perpetually  writing  verses,  not  remarkable 
except  for  a  certain  ease  of  expression  and  for  a 
power  of  running  on,  not  common  at  that  early  age." 
Cares  of  a  scholarly  and  of  a  pastoral  kind  seem 
to  have  obstructed  the  progress  of  the  muse  in  the 
higher  forms.  At  any  rate  only  two  or  three  school- 
boy poems  are  published  along  with  the  later  pro- 
ductions. Of  these  the  one  called  '*  An  Incident  "  is 
a  direct  imitation  of  Wordsworth,  the  Wordsworth 
of  ''  We  are  Seven."  It  is  very  moral,  very  carefully 
simple,  and  rather  pretty.     "  An  Evening  Walk  in 


32  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

Spring  "  is  more  interesting.  It  is  very  Words- 
worthian  too,  and  very  sentimental,  but  it  is  obvi- 
ously the  result  of  a  real  emotional  experience.  The 
young  poet  finds  himself  unprevented  by  a  scene  of 
peace  and  quiet  joy  from  sinking  into  a  conviction 
of  guilt.  This  conviction,  characteristically  enough, 
remains  unweakened  by  the  failure  of  a  diligent 
search  for  some  empirical  evidence  to  explain  it. 
Then  the  thought  comes  of  a  sick  friend  (one  of  the 
Arnold  boys),  and  the  depressing  beauties  of  nature 
are  quickly  left  behind  for  the  more  appealing  atmo- 
sphere of  the  sick-room.  If,  as  seems  likely,  the 
lesson  of  the  poem  is  to  be  found  in  the  lines  : 

"  And  then  there  came  the  thought  of  one 
Who  on  his  bed  of  sickness  lay^ 
Whilst  I  beneath  the  setting  sun 

Was  dreaming  this  sweet  hour  away  "■ — 

if  the  lesson  is  here,  that  lesson  is  the  precarious  one 
for  a  boy  wanting  to  become  a  poet,  that  it  is  very 
wrong  to  dream  sweet  hours  away.  True,  the  lesson 
once  taken  to  heart,  the  loveliness  of  the  scene  is 
no  longer  wasted  on  the  boy,  and  brings  tears  of 
joy  to  his  eyes  as  he  turns  them  away  from  it.  But 
the  emphasis  of  the  piece  is  all  on  inward  beauty  ; 
any  scene,  we  may  suppose,  will  be  beautiful  when 
looked  at  from  eyes  glowing  with  the  right  intensity 
of  goodness. 

It  was  perhaps  the  foremost  quality  of  the  adult 
Clough  that  he  was  a  quite  exceptionally  perceptive 
and  honest  critic  of  his  own  nature,  his  own  philo- 


AT  RUGBY  33 

sophy,  and  his  own  life.  He  has  provided  us  with 
some  comment  on  his  experience  at  Rugby,  which 
goes  beyond  other  criticism  of  the  effect  of  the  school 
on  him  in  pronouncing  that  effect  deleterious.  He 
writes  this  criticism  in  the  Epilogue  to  Dipsychus. 
Most  of  it  is  put  into  the  mouth  of  the  uncle  that  the 
poet  provides  for  himself  as  hero.  Much  of  it — it 
is  not  long,  of  course — has  more  important  bearing 
on  later  stages  of  Clough's  life,  and  will  be  considered 
in  later  chapters.  But  a  few  lines  must  be  quoted 
here.  The  uncle  gets  to  the  subject  through  some 
talk  about  tender  consciences  :  these  are  all  too 
common,  he  says  :  "  schoolboy  consciences,  too ! 
As  my  old  friend  the  Canon  says  of  the  Westminster 
students,  'They're  all  so  pious.'  It's  all  Arnold's 
doing  ;  he  spoilt  the  public  school."  The  poet,  of 
course,  represents  himself  as  protesting  against  this 
extreme  conclusion.  His  relative  upholds  the  old 
schools,  claiming  for  them,  not  perfection,  but  that 
"  whatever  else  they  were  or  did,  they  certainly  were 
in  harmony  with  the  world,  and  they  certainly  did 
not  disqualify  the  country's  youth  for  after-life  and 
the  country's  service."  His  nephews,  reared  on  the 
Arnold  plan,  seem  to  this  worthy  English  gentleman 
"  a  sort  of  hobbledehoy  cherub,  too  big  to  be  inno- 
cent, and  too  simple  for  anything  else.  They're  full 
of  the  notion  of  the  world  being  so  wicked  and  of 
their  taking  a  higher  line,  as  they  call  it.  I  only 
fear  they'll  never  take  any  line  at  all.  What  is  the 
true  purpose  of  education  ?    Simply  to  make  plain  to 


34  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

the  young  understanding  laws  of  the  life  they  will 
have  to  enter.  For  example — that  lying  won't  do, 
thieving  still  less  ;  that  idleness  will  get  punished  ; 
that  if  they  are  cowards  the  whole  world  will  be 
against  them  ;  that  if  they  will  have  their  own  way 
they  must  fight  for  it.  As  for  the  conscience — 
mamma,  I  take  it, — such  as  mammas  are  nowadays, 
at  any  rate — has  probably  set  that  agoing  fast  enough 
already." 

Another  avuncular  speech  brings  the  question 
down  directly  to  the  case  of  the  poet :  "  Put  him  " 
(the  schoolboy)  "  through  a  strong  course  of  confirm- 
ation and  sacraments,  backed  up  with  sermons  and 
private  admonitions,  and  what  is  much  the  same  as 
auricular  confession,  and  really,  my  dear  nephew, 
I  can't  answer  for  it  but  he  mayn't  turn  out  as  great 
a  goose  as  you — pardon  me — were  about  the  age  of 
eighteen  or  nineteen." 

This  is  extreme  criticism,  and  it  is  not  necessary, 
nor  admissible,  to  take  it  as  a  careful  statement  of 
Clough's  own  views.  It  is  a  statement,  rather,  of 
one  of  two  opposing  opinions  concerning  the  value  of 
his  training  for  life  between  which,  as  between  two 
opinions  of  the  value  of  life  itself,  the  Clough  of 
Dipsychus  was  wavering.  Assuming  as  a  third,  and 
in  some  sort  final  and  real,  opinion  the  mean  between 
these  two  contrary  views,  we  may  take  it,  perhaps, 
that  if  Clough  still  thought  Rugby  had  done  him 
good,  he  thought  also  that  Rugby  had  done  him  harm. 
It  had  taught  him  much,  but  it  had  concealed  much. 


AT  RUGBY  35 

Its  philosophy,  in  the  pure  and  unalloyed  form  in 
which  he  had  adopted  it,  had  started  him  on  a  path 
that  was  removed  from  the  highroad  of  hfe,  and  had 
stood  in  his  way  when  the  desire  grew  upon  him  to 
leave  the  path  for  the  road. 

Clough  had  unusually  firm  friends  all  his  life,  but 
there  was  a  completeness  about  his  personal  ascen- 
dancy at  Rugby  which  he  never  again  approached. 
In  the  school  he  went  about  proselytizing,  very 
genuinely  for  the  good  of  the  proselytes  and  not  for 
any  selfish  purpose  ;  but  in  later  life  he  had  always 
too  strong  a  sense  that  his  own  position  might  shift, 
or  was  shifting,  to  desire  to  call  recruits  to  his  banner. 
He  had  at  Rugby  the  strength  that  comes  from  single- 
ness of  mind.  His  life  to  the  time  that  he  left  for 
Oxford  is  a  record  of  uninterrupted  pursuit  of  a 
certain  very  definite  and  limited  set  of  ideals.  He 
devoted  his  every  energy  and  ardour  to  these  ideals. 
Naturally  he  attained  great  successes  and  profound 
respect.  It  is  conceivable  that  he  might  have 
retained  to  the  end  this  arrow  straightness  of  direc- 
tion and  arrow  swiftness  of  speed.  The  difficulty 
was  that  the  Arnold  spirit,  like  many  another  theme 
of  eloquence  and  of  jest,  bore  within  itself  the  seeds 
of  its  own  destruction.  It  insisted,  that  is,  first 
of  aU,  on  looking  everything  straight  in  the  face.  A 
few  of  the  things  which  presented  themselves  for 
Clough  to  look  at  when  he  found  himself  outside 
Rugby  were  Newmanism,  scepticism,  and  utili- 
tarianism ;    and  he  soon   discovered   that  a  first 


36  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

necessity  of  looking  all  three  of  these  variously 
placed  monsters  straight  in  the  face  at  the  same 
time,  was  totally  incompatible  with  rapid  progress 
in  any  single  direction. 

On  the  basis  mainly  of  examination,  Clough  won 
in  his  last  year  at  school  a  scholarship  in  Balliol 
College,  the  highest  honour  to  which  an  English 
schoolboy  could  attain.  Everybody  who  knew  him 
quite  confidently  and  interestedly  expected  that 
he  would  win  all  the  prizes  of  Oxford  as  he  had  won 
all  the  prizes  of  Rugby.  He  himself  doubtless 
shared  in  that  opinion  at  first,  but  rather  taking  it 
as  a  matter  of  course,  apparently,  than  feeling  at  all 
excited  about  it. 

Clough  spent  with  his  family  the  summer  after  he 
finished  this  work  at  Rugby,  and  went  up  to  Oxford 
University  in  October  1837. 


CHAPTER  III 

AS   UNDERGRADUATE 

IN  Oxford  Clough  was  to  spend  eleven  years — 
four  as  an  undergraduate,  at  Balliol,  an  inter- 
mediate year  of  orientation,  and  six  years  as  fellow 
of  Oriel.  In  his  own  life  this  was  the  period  from  his 
nineteenth  to  his  thirtieth  year.  In  the  life  of  the 
University  these  were  the  years  of  the  growth,  the 
maturity,  and  the  fall  of  the  Oxford  Movement. 
The  propaganda  had  started  in  1833.  When  Clough 
came  up  to  his  college  four  years  later  it  was  in  full 
career.  It  continued  for  four  years  more  to  make 
progress.  Tract  Ninety  came  out  in  1841,  calling 
into  ferocious  activity  all  the  hostility  to  itself 
that  the  Movement  had  contracted.  Four  years  of 
tension  and  anxiety  followed.  Newman  joined  the 
Church  of  Rome  in  1845  ;  and  the  University  was 
occupied  during  the  last  three  years  of  Clough' s 
residence,  and  for  a  much  longer  time  than  that,  in 
the  attempt  to  repair  the  damage  and  to  secure  the 
good  that  the  Movement  had  done  to  the  Estabhshed 
Church. 

So  important  was  the  Movement,  in  Oxford 
eyes,  so  admirable  its  leaders — or  their  rivals — so 
exciting  its  controversies,  so  grave  its  issues,  that 
it  attracted  to  itself  nearly  all  the  free  intellectual 
activity  of  the  University.     Politics  the  Tractarians 

37 


38  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

turned  over  to  the  impossible  Liberals,  pending 
the  time  when  an  invincible  weapon  against  them 
should  be  available  in  a  thoroughly  reorganized, 
mediaevalized  Church.  Literature  was  given  up 
to  the  mercies  of  the  plebeian  Dickens,  the  philistine 
Macaulay,  and  that  unaccountable  stranger,  Carlyle. 
Science  was  left  to  confer  upon  London  University 
the  unenvied  title  of  Stinkomalee.  Oxford  talked, 
and  thought,  and  dreamed  Religion. 

Much  of  this  preoccupation  with  religious  questions 
is  to  be  explained  by  the  essentially  ecclesiastical 
character  of  the  University  rather  than  by  the  attrac- 
tion of  a  particular  movement.  Oxford  was  much 
more  of  a  Church  institution  in  the  first  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  than  it  is  now.  Signing  the 
Articles  was  a  necessary  step  not  only  in  gaining 
admittance  to  the  University  in  the  first  place,  but 
also  in  accepting  any  college  fellowship  or  tutorship. 
Nearly  all  the  "dons"  were  celibate,  many  of 
them  priests  or  deacons  in  the  Church.  After 
scholarship,  or  in  many  cases  before  scholarship, 
religion  was  their  business.  As  their  part  in  the 
change  in  all  fields  of  effort  from  the  dullness  and 
neglect  of  the  eighteenth  century  to  the  anxious 
activity  of  the  nineteenth,  it  was  the  task  of  the 
senior  members  of  the  University  to  speed  up  religion 
no  less  than  to  speed  up  learning.  Something  had 
to  be  done  to  strengthen  the  Church,  on  the  one  hand 
against  nonconformity,  and  on  the  other  against 
the  rapidly  quickening  interest  in  affairs  purely  of 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  39 

this  world.  Before  the  Oxford  Movement  started 
Whately  and  Arnold,  among  others,  had  set  about 
reforming,  but  in  a  Latitudinarian,  not  in  the  Roman, 
direction.  In  other  words,  a  movement  more  or 
less  like  the  Tractarian  Movement  was  natural  and 
necessary  in  the  'thirties  and  'forties  at  Oxford. 
It  is  only  the  particular  form  that  this  tendency  was 
to  take  which  was  decided  by  the  conjunction  of 
those  three  remarkable  characters,  Keble  and  New- 
man and  Hurrell  Froude. 

These  three  men  were  young,  as  it  is  natural  that 
reformers  should  be.  They  were  young  in  years  when 
they  started  their  work,  and  they  were  careful  to  retain 
their  youthful  simplicity  of  spirit  and  accessibility. 
They  made  a  great  point  of  exerting  the  greatest 
possible  personal  influence  on  the  minds  of  under- 
graduates. Newman  in  his  Apologia,  though  he 
remarks  in  one  place,  "  To  the  last  I  never  recog- 
nized the  hold  I  had  over  young  men,"  says  in  another 
place,  "  It  was  through  friends,  younger  for  the 
most  part  than  myself,  that  my  principles  were 
spreading.  They  heard  what  I  said  in  conversation, 
and  told  it  to  others.  Undergraduates  in  due  time 
took  their  degree,  and  became  private  tutors  them- 
selves. In  this  new  status  they  in  turn  preached  the 
opinions  with  which  they  had  already  become 
acquainted."  So  there  was  built  up  and  kept  in 
operation  a  regular  system  of  leadership  by  tutors 
of  undergraduate  opinion.  An  undergraduate 
might  make  of  himself  a  social  leader  or  an  athletic 


40  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

leader,  a  man  like  Drysdale  of  Tom  Brown  at  Oxford, 
or  a  man  like  Hardy,  but  he  could  hardly  hope  to 
become  a  leader  by  virtue  of  his  intellectual  force 
or  his  rehgious  earnestness. 

This  was  particularly  true  of  Oxford  at  the  time 
of  the  all-absorbing  Movement ;  but  it  is  always 
true  of  a  university,  to  an  extent  at  least  in  which 
it  is  not  true  of  a  secondary  school.  The  master  of  a 
great  school,  Arnold  at  Rugby  for  instance,  is  so  far 
over  the  heads  of  his  young  pupils,  his  stature  so 
great  in  comparison  with  theirs,  that  he  can  exercise 
an  effective  leadership,  not  directly,  but  only  in- 
directly through  trustworthy  and  advanced  boys  of 
the  upper  grades  of  the  school.  To  a  boy  of  this  sort 
power  comes  down  from  above  as  if  through  an  elec- 
trical transformer,  and  in  the  proud  excitement  of 
early  responsibility  he  forgets  the  derived  nature 
of  it,  and  builds  up  in  himself  such  a  feeling  of  per- 
sonal authority  as  hinders  him  ever  thereafter  from 
easily  and  naturally  becoming  a  follower  of  any 
other  man.  He  has  over-developed  his  will  and  his 
thinking  powers,  just  as  another  man  has  over- 
developed in  athletics  the  muscles  of  his  heart. 
And  just  as  there  is  danger  to  the  athlete  in  a  too 
sudden  letting  down  from  habits  of  strenuous  exer- 
cise, so  there  are  serious  possibilities  of  loss  of  tone 
in  the  young  leader  who  finds  himself  suddenly 
left  with  nobody  to  lead. 

It  was  an  experience  of  this  sort  which  Clough 
passed  through  in  proceeding  from  Rugby  to  Oxford, 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  41 

and  which  may  perhaps  be  taken  to  account  for  the 
unexpectedly  poor  showing  that  he  made  at  the 
University.  At  Rugby  he  carried  off  all  the  prizes 
and  distinctions  available  ;  at  Oxford  he  won  few 
prizes,  if  any,  and  finished  his  undergraduate  career 
by  becoming  the  first  Balliol  scholar  since  the  begin- 
ning of  class  lists  to  fall  down  to  a  second  in  the 
schools.  It  is  usual  to  account  for  this  slowing  up  in 
Clough  by  the  assertion  that  in  coming  under  the 
influence  first  of  Arnold  and  then  of  Newman  he 
was  subjected  to  a  strain  that  was  both  too  long 
continued  and  too  much  the  same  thing  from  first 
to  last.  For  instance,  one  of  his  best  friends  at 
Balliol,  Mr.  W.  G.  Ward,  a  Tractarian  who  later 
followed  Newman  into  the  Church  of  Rome,  said 
of  Clough  :  "  What  was  before  all  things  to  have 
been  desired  for  him,  was  that  during  his  under- 
graduate career  he  should  have  given  himself  up 
thoroughly  to  his  classical  and  mathematical  studies, 
and  kept  himself  from  plunging  prematurely  into  the 
theological  controversies  then  so  rife  at  Oxford. 
Thus  he  would  have  been  saved  from  all  injury  to 
the  gradual  and  healthy  growth  of  his  mind  and 
character.  It  is  my  own  very  strong  impression 
that,  had  this  been  permitted,  his  future  course  of 
thought  and  speculation  would  have  been  essentially 
different  from  what  it  was  in  fact.  Drawn  as  it 
were  peremptorily,  when  a  young  man  just  coming 
up  to  college,  into  a  decision  upon  questions  the 
most  important  that  can  occupy  the  mind,  the  result 


42  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

was  not  surprising.  After  this  premature  forcing 
of  Clough's  mind,  there  came  a  reaction.  His  intel- 
lectual perplexity  preyed  heavily  on  his  spirits,  and 
grievously  interfered  with  his  studies." 

Ward  knew  Clough  well,  but  his  own  absorption 
in  religious  problems  would  make  him  quick  to  see 
religious  questionings,  and  of  the  particular  kind 
that  troubled  himself,  at  the  bottom  of  any  man's 
difficulties.  But  nothing  outside  the  man  himself, 
not  even  the  Tractarian  controversy,  is  enough  to 
account  for  such  a  state  of  mind  as  Clough's.  It  is 
something  in  the  working  of  the  mind  that  is  at  fault 
in  such  cases.  Clough's  mind  was  perplexed,  not 
because  the  problems  it  was  confronted  with  were 
heavy,  but  because  they  were  light,  not  because  it 
had  too  much  on  it,  but  because  it  had  too  little  on 
it.  At  Rugby  Clough  had  many  things  to  do,  and 
did  them  all  well,  and  looked  about  for  more  things 
to  do.  At  Oxford,  lacking  responsibility,  and  pre- 
vented by  the  system  of  things  from  acquiring  it, 
he  lacked  interest  in  doing  things,  lacked  therefore 
things  to  do,  and  the  few  things  that  he  did,  did 
rather  badly.  He  took  to  thinking,  instead  ;  and 
from  the  least  sceptical  of  schoolboys  changed  to 
the  most  speculative  of  college  men. 

But  not  only  was  there  too  little  leading  for 
Clough  to  do  at  Oxford  :  there  was  also  too  little 
studying  to  do.  His  own  ripest  comment  on  his 
situation  in  this  respect  is  to  be  found  in  a  review 
which  he  wrote  of  the  Oxford  University  Com- 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  43 

missioners'  Report  of  1852.  In  an  extract  from  this 
review  which  is  printed  in  the  Prose  Remains,  there 
occurs  an  approving  account  of  the  course  of  study 
at  Rugby,  followed  by  the  exclamation  that  no  words 
could  express  the  amount  of  the  change  from  Rugby 
to  Oxford.  "  Had  I  not  read,"  he  asks,  "  pretty 
nearly  all  the  books  ?  Was  I  to  go  on,  keeping  up 
my  Latin  prose  writers,  for  three  years  more  ? 
Logic  and  Ethics  had  some  little  novelty  ;  there 
was  a  little  extra  scholarship  to  be  obtained  in  some 
of  the  college  lectures.  But  that  was  the  utmost. — 
I  had  been  pretty  well  sated  of  distinctions  and  com- 
petitions at  school ;  I  would  gladly  have  dispensed 
with  anything  more  of  success  in  this  kind,  always 
excepting  the  £200  of  the  Fellowship.  What  I 
wanted  was  to  sit  down  to  happy,  unimpeded  pro- 
secution of  some  new  subject  or  subjects. — An 
infinite  lassitude  and  impatience,  which  I  saw  re- 
flected in  the  faces  of  others,  quickly  began  to  infect 
me.  Quousque  Latin  prose  ?  "  An  impossible  de- 
sire of  Ward's — that  Clough  "  should  have  given 
himself  up  thoroughly  to  his  classical  and  mathe- 
matical studies." 

Not  much  evidence  remains  of  the  plunge  into 
theological  controversies  to  which  Ward  ascribes 
Clough's  comparative  neglect  of  his  studies.  Clough 
himself  said,  much  later,  that  for  two  years  he  had 
been  "  like  a  straw  drawn  up  by  the  draught  from 
a  chimney."  These  two  years  would  appear  to  have 
been  the  first  of  his  university  residence.    The  letters 


44  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

from  these  years  are  not  numerous,  but  in  those  few 
there  is  no  sign  of  a  pronounced  addiction  to  New- 
manistic  ideas.  In  May  1838  he  writes  to  his 
Cambridge  friend  Gell:  "It  is  no  harm,  but  rather 
good,  to  give  oneself  up  a  Httle  to  learning  Oxford 
people,  and  admiring  their  good  points,  which  lie, 
I  suppose,  principally  in  all  they  hold  in  opposition 
to  the  Evangelical  portion  of  society — the  benefit 
and  beauty  and  necessity  of  forms — the  ugliness  of 
feelings  put  on  unnaturally  soon,  and  consequently 
kept  up  by  artificial  means,  ever  strained  and  never 
sober."  He  runs  on  through  the  letter,  condemning 
one  or  two,  but  moderately  commending  more,  of 
the  Tractarian  positions,  and  concludes :  "If  I  had 

said  a  quarter  of  this  to ,  he  would  have  set  me 

down  at  once  for  a  thorough-going  convert  ad  New- 
manismum.  But  you  will  not  be  so  rash  ;  and  you 
remember  that  you  asked  me  to  write  about  it." 
A  year  later  he  writes  to  the  same  friend :  "  I  found 
that  at  Rugby  I  had  been  quite  set  down  among 
theological  gossips  as  a  Newmanist,  but  the  impres- 
sion was  pretty  well  removed  by  the  time  I  came 
away."  The  earlier  of  these  two  letters  opens  with 
the  words :  "  One  thing,  I  suppose,  is  clear — that 
one  must  leave  the  discussion  of  Ta  NeavSpcoirLKa" 
— his  name  for  Newmanism — "  all  snug  and  quiet 
for  after  one's  degree."  These  are  obviously  not 
expressions  of  a  soul  "  drawn  up  like  a  straw  by  the 
draught  of  a  chimney."  Either  Clough  remained 
genuinely  calm  through  the  storm  of  Newmanism, 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  45 

or  he  was  very  successful  in  dissimulating  his  excite- 
ment to  his  correspondents. 

But  if  neither  to  tracts  nor  to  books  for  schools, 
to  what,  then,  was  Clough  devoting  his  first  atten- 
tion in  his  undergraduate  years  ?  Not,  apparently, 
to  riotous  living,  nor  to  reading  out  of  course,  nor 
to  complete  indolence  ;  rather  to  developing  that 
firmness  and  consistency  of  character  which  was  the 
most  remarkable  thing  about  him  in  his  later  life. 
He  fell  down  in  his  examinations,  not  because  he 
had  spent  too  little  time  in  studying,  but  because 
he  had  done  his  studying  with  an  eye  to  self-dis- 
cipline rather  than  to  the  examinations.  "  The 
object  of  honours,"  he  writes  to  his  sister,  after  tak- 
ing his  second,  "is  to  make  men  read  and  not  to 
make  them  distinguished ;  and  if  I  have  read,  it 
is  all  the  same  whether  I  am  distinguished  or  not, 
and,  so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  perhaps  better." 

The  same  idea  must  have  occurred  to  many  men 
similarly  situated,  as  an  easy  bit  of  self-consolation. 
But  there  is  every  reason  to  believe  that  it  had  a 
much  more  genuine  validity  for  Clough.  In  the 
next  letter  which  he  wrote  his  sister,  he  apologized, 
it  is  true,  for  expressing  it :  "I  hope  you  will  not 
blab  my  bravado  any  further."  But  the  bravado  is 
really  in  the  apology,  and  not  in  the  utterance 
apologized  for.  Never  after  his  schooldays  was  it 
necessary  for  Clough  to  pretend  indifference  to  the 
outward  signs  of  success  ;  his  task  was  rather  to 
pretend,  to  himself  still  more  than  to  others,  that  he 


46  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

did  care  anything  at  all  about  them.  The  difference 
between  apparent  good  and  real  good  in  men  so 
occupied  and  weighed  upon  his  mind,  and  caused 
him  to  commit  himself  so  definitely  to  the  one  rather 
than  to  the  other,  that,  in  himself  at  any  rate,  he 
became  quite  unduly  suspicious  of  the  appearance 
of  excellence. 

He  writes  to  some  one  that  he  regards  the  loss, 
or  diminution,  of  his  reputation  for  scholarship  as 
a  good  thing.  It  might,  he  felt,  have  resulted 
in  his  maintaining  a  false  opinion  of  himself.  Clough 
was  as  far  as  any  one  from  having  an  "  itch  for 
martyrdom  "  in  the  usual  sentimental  sense  ;  but 
he  had  a  great  deal  of  an  intellectual  and  moral 
something  of  the  sort.  He  was  too  much  inclined 
to  regard  it  as  a  guarantee  of  the  rightness  of  a 
course  of  conduct  that  it  should  lead  away  from, 
rather  than  toward,  the  attainment  of  any  concrete 
good.  Such  a  thing  it  was  to  have  made  oneself  the 
quintessential  Rugbeian. 

His  manner  of  living  at  Balliol  was  decidedly 
ascetic.  He  lived  in  small  rooms,  first  in  the  garret 
and  then  on  the  ground  floor  of  his  quadrangle ; 
and  he  went  through  at  least  one  entire  winter 
without  any  fire.  He  was  alone  much  of  the  time, 
partly  because  his  poverty  led  him  to  avoid  incurring 
social  obligations,  but  still  more  for  the  sake  of 
reflection  and  of  resolute  carrying  out  of  self-imposed 
programmes  of  work.  In  the  last  of  his  undergraduate 
years  he  lived  in  lodgings  in  a  sm.aU'  cottage  just  off 


AS   UNDERGRADUATE  47 

the  Oxford  street  which  is  named  Holywell.  The 
Cherwell  stream  is  near  by,  and  in  it,  Principal 
Shairp  records,  Clough  went  bathing  every  morning 
during  the  winter.  It  was  obvious  to  his  friends 
and  to  his  family  that  a  great  mental  struggle  was 
going  on  in  him.  But  he  sought  no  relief  from  bur- 
dening any  one  else  with  his  worries.  Even  the  loss 
he  is  said  to  have  suffered  of  great  quantities  of  brown 
hair  failed  to  deter  him  from  keeping  on,  with  con- 
siderable outward  serenity,  in  the  Spartan  hardness 
of  his  chosen  way  of  life.  "  His  one  idea,"  says 
Ward,  "  seemed  always  to  be  that  he  should  to-day 
do  to-day's  duty,  and  for  the  rest  leave  himself  in 
God's  hands."  For  a  university  student  to  be  faith- 
ful to  such  an  idea  as  this  is  not  the  result  of  spon- 
taneous impulse  or  of  chance.  Asceticism  is  the 
road  to  such  an  attitude  to  life.  It  was  the  road 
Clough  took  ;    and  he  kept  the  road. 

What  Clough  chiefly  strove  for  at  Oxford,  then, 
was  not  a  First,  but  self-control.  And  since  the 
men  who  knew  him  well,  and  he  himself,  are  suffi- 
ciently agreed  that  he  won  the  self-control,  his 
undergraduate  career  stands  as  a  success  in  spite 
of  his  loss  of  the  First.  It  was  a  success  of  a  kind 
of  which  Clough  was  to  win  two  or  three  more  in  the 
rest  of  his  life.  These  successes  went  unrewarded 
except  by  themselves  and  by  the  affectionate  and 
respectful  appreciation  of  a  circle  of  good  friends,  a 
number  of  them  distinguished.  They  stand  now  as 
the  unmistakable  marks  of  a  character  of  the  very 


48  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

highest  and  strongest  type.  The  first  of  them,  of 
course,  was  the  greatest.  What  it  meant  was  that 
Clough  had  aheady  as  an  undergraduate  freed 
himself  from  all  other  criteria  of  conduct  than  his 
own  sense  of  duty.  Newman  has  celebrated  the 
phrase  that  represented  to  him  the  intuition  on  which 
he  came  to  base  all  truth  and  conduct :  "  Securus 
judicat  orbis  ten  arum."  Clough  was  not  imagina- 
tive like  Newman.  The  strong  force  in  him  was  his 
individual  conscience.  It  was  in  his  conscience 
therefore  that  he  found  his  test  of  truth.  A  motto 
for  him  in  form  parallel  to  Newman's  would  require 
for  orbis  terrarum  some  such  words  as  conscientia 
individua  fortis . 

To  find  the  relief  that  any  normal  person  must 
desire  from  the  spectacle  of  the  tense  life  of  the 
ascetic,  it  is  necessary  to  regard  Clough  when  he  is 
away  from  Oxford,  spending  his  holidays  in  Liver- 
pool. He  seems  never  to  have  been  burdened  with 
the  usual  disposition  of  the  seeker  after  perfec- 
tion to  be  hard  on  the  frailties  of  those  around 
him,  or  of  the  artist  to  concede  to  some  one  else  the 
privilege  of  standing  as  a  firm  reliance  in  time  of 
great  troubles  or  small.  The  issues  that  he  attended 
to  in  his  speculation  and  his  poetry  were  vast ; 
but  he  could  always  enter  naturally  and  sympathetic- 
ally into  the  everyday  lives  of  his  people,  and  be 
really  interested  in  all  that  was  happening  to  them. 

The  verse  Clough  wrote  in  his  undergraduate 
days  runs  to  hardly  more  than  ten  pages  in  his 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  49 

published  works,  and  of  that  total  something  near 
half  was  probably  composed  in  the  months  imme- 
diately following  his  taking  of  a  degree.  In  these 
early  Oxford  poems  as  in  those  done  at  Rugby 
it  is  obvious  that  Clough's  poet  is  Wordsworth. 
One  or  two  of  them,  "  In  a  Lecture  Room  "  and  the 
sonnet,  "  The  Shady  Lane,"  are  pure  Wordsworth. 
A  good  deal  of  Wordsworth  was  always  to  remain 
with  Clough — a  good  deal  of  his  simplicity  of  feelings 
and  words.  In  the  early  poems  there  is  much  of 
the  elder  poet's  feeling  for  nature — in  his  later  work 
this  feeling  gives  way  to  something  much  closer 
to  the  ordinary  man's  pleasure  in  outdoor  life.  The 
morality  of  these  verses  sounds  much  like  Words- 
worth, but  more  still,  in  most  cases,  like  Dr.  Arnold. 
It  is  less  emotional  and  aesthetic,  that  is,  and  more 
intellectual  and  voluntary.  Something  of  roman- 
tic weltschmerz  comes  out  in  the  pieces  called  "  Re- 
vival "  and  "  A  Song  of  Autumn."  There  is  nothing 
from  first  to  last  that  the  Oxford  Movement  can 
possibly  be  considered  to  have  inspired.  There  is 
no  single  echo  of  the  sweetness  and  the  subtlety 
of  The  Christian  Year  and  Lyra  Apostolica. 

Nor  is  there  anything  in  the  substance  of  these 
poems  that  can  certainly  be  said  to  have  proceeded 
from  the  conflict  into  which  Keble  and  Newman 
had  plunged  the  University.  Possibly  the  emotions 
which  that  conflict  temporarily  excited  in  the  breast 
of  Clough  were  too  intense  to  be  represented  in  verse  ; 
and  if  later  he  made  any  attempt  to  "  recollect 


50  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGM 

them  in  tranquillity,"  in  accordance  with  the  for- 
mula of  his  master,  he  found,  even  very  shortly 
after  his  recovery  of  calm,  that  they  no  longer  meant 
anything  for  him.  For  it  was  only  during  a  very 
short  period  that  Clough's  problem  was  Newman 
or  anti-Newman — Newman  or  Arnold.  He  came 
early  to  see  that  Newman  and  Arnold  were  both 
on  the  same  side  in  the  conflict  that  was  really 
fundamental,  that  was  his  conflict — the  conflict 
between  common  sense  and  open-mindedness  on 
the  one  hand  and,  on  the  other,  adherence  to  any 
set  of  principles  that  had  been  set  up  and  were  kept 
up  by  deliberate  action  of  the  will.  What  it  comes 
to  to  say  that  "  Oxford  is  the  home  of  lost  causes," 
is  that  Oxford  is  the  home,  for  England,  of  this  second 
kind  of  thinking — thinking  that  is  tested  by  refer- 
ence not  to  things  as  they  are  actually  going  on  in 
the  real  world,  but  to  things  as  they  go  on  in  an 
ideal  world.  Newman  and  Arnold  were  both,  in 
this  respect,  typical  Oxford  thinkers.  Clough's 
emotions  and  his  imagination  went  out  to  these 
men,  to  Oxford,  and  to  Oxford  ways ;  but  his 
extraordinarily  honest  and  persistent  mind  pulled 
him  steadily  in  the  opposite  direction. 

It  is  interesting  to  see  what  implications  each 
of  the  two  ways  of  thinking  between  which  he 
vacillated  had  for  Clough  in  respect  to  his  own 
conduct.  He  very  definitely  associated  action  with 
the  acceptance  of  one  or  the  other  of  the  two  sets 
of  principles,  Newman's  or  Arnold's.     Open-minded- 


AS   UNDERGRADUATE  51 

ness,  on  the  other  hand,  meant  to  him  a  kind  of 
quietism,  a  patient  waiting  for  a  revelation,  which — 
— quite  unempirically,  indeed — ^he  felt  was  absolutely 
certain  to  come.  Conduct  was  a  matter  for  him  al- 
most wholly  of  expressing  opinions,  of  entering 
actively  into  the  controversies  of  Oxford,  and  of 
enlightening,  mainly  through  poetry,  we  may  sup- 
pose, the  world  outside  the  walls.  Before  he  could 
get  to  work  at  these  tasks  he  must  have  settled 
opinions.  He  could  have  these  at  the  expense  of 
submitting  his  judgment  to  his  own  will,  with 
Arnold,  or  to  his  will  submitted  in  turn  to  an 
organized  expression  of  will  outside  himself,  with 
Newman.  But  to  place  will  above  judgment  was 
a  step  he  was  temperamentally  incapable  of  taking. 
He  simply  was  one  of  those  who  in  the  last  resort 
trust  in  the  power  of  reason,  and  can  believe  that 
reason  is  divine  more  easily  than  they  can  believe 
will  is  divine.  Will  to  Clough  was  his  human  self ; 
to  accept  and  reject  opinions  by  an  act  of  will  was 
to  commit  the  deadly  sin  of  Pride. 

It  is  this  pride  that  he  is  crying  out  against,  striving 
to  throw  off,  in  the  poem  called  "  The  Higher 
Courage  " : 

"  Come  bacK  again,  my  olden  heart  ! 
Alas,  I  called  not  then  for  thee  ; 
I  called  for  Courage,  and  apart 
From  Pride  if  Courage  could  not  be. 
Then  welcome.  Pride  !  " 

The  mood  of  pride  and  will  is  the  mood,  appar- 


52  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

ently,  of  Clough's  temporary  inclination  to  go  with 
the  Newmanists.  He  longs  for  the  days  of  his 
devotion  to  Arnold  as  a  time  of  wise  passivity  and 
acceptance,  because  that  earlier  devotion  was  not 
a  willed  matter,  but  spontaneous.  Dogmatism  is 
strong  ;  but  he  hates,  and  refuses,  to  will  himself 
into  any  form  of  it.  He  seems  really  hopeful  of 
recovering  his  early  unawareness  that  the  time 
comes  in  this  world,  at  any  rate  for  all  such  thinkers 
as  he,  when  it  is  absolutely  necessary  to  inject  the 
will,  deliberately,  into  the  making  of  decisions. 
The  higher  courage  is  the  courage  to  remain  rudder- 
less among  shifting  currents,  to  appear  to  other 
men  to  be  indecisive  and  lacking  in  convictions. 

"  Come  back  again,  old  heart  !    Ah  me  ! 
Methinks  in  those  thy  coward  fears 
There  might,  perchance,  a  courage  be,     ' 
That  fails  in  these  the  manlier  years  ; 
Courage  to  let  the  courage  sink. 
Itself  a  coward  base  to  think. 
Rather  than  not  for  heavenly  light 
Wait  on  to  show  the  truly  right." 

The  side  of  Clough  which,  even  in  this  time  of 
extremest  doubt  and  hesitation,  thirsted  for  action, 
finds  expression  in  the  poem  with  the  Greek  title, 
*'  'xpvaea  /c\^9  eVl  yXtoaaa  " — "  A  Golden  Key  on 
the  Tongue."  Here  is  voiced,  for  the  first  time 
specifically,  a  longing  for  the  turmoil  of  the  real 
outside  world,  for  human  relations,  and  work,  and 
excitement.  Not  on  Poesy,  nor  revery,  nor  on 
"  some  vain  mate  "  is  life  to  be  wasted : 


AS  UNDERGRADUATE  53 

"  Heaven  grant  the  manlier  heart,  that  timely,  ere 
Youth  fly,  with  life's  real  tempest  would  be  coping ; 
The  fruit  of  dreamy  hoping 
Is,  waking,  blank  despair." 

A  sufficiently  blank  state  of  despair  is  revealed  in 
the  nine  short  pieces,  mainly  sonnets,  grouped  to- 
gether under  the  head  of  "  Blank  Misgivings  of  a 
Creature  moving  about  in  Worlds  not  realized." 
Remorse  is  the  sustained  note  in  these,  in  spite  of 
the  outward  appearance  of  blamelessness  inClough's 
early  life.  Listlessness  and  inactivity  are  abundantly 
regretted,  but  the  principal  source  of  pain  is  the  con- 
viction of  having  lived  a  lie  : 

"  How  often  sit  I,  poring  o'er 
My  strange  distorted  youth. 
Seeking  in  vain,  in  all  my  store. 
One  feeling  based  on  truth." 

A  sickening  lack  of  correspondence  is  discovered 
between  the  circumstances  of  the  outer  and  those 
of  the  inner  life.  The  acts  and  speeches  of  daily 
life  fail  utterly  to  reach 

"  The  buried  world  below." 
Sometimes  the  expression  of  discontent  takes  obvi- 
ously imitated  forms,  with  no  truth  at  all  in  them 
for  Clough  himself,  as  when  he  is  so  Byronic  as  to 
say : 

"  I  pace  about  the  pathways  of  the  world. 
Plucking  light  hopes  and  joys  from  every  stem." 

Such  a  notion  of  himself,  even  when  copied  from 
another,  is  encouraging  as  one  of  the  few  signs  of 


54  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

an  imagination  in  the  early  Clough.  Very  moral, 
and  not  at  all  aesthetic,  is  the  strong  religious  feeling 
of  this  series  of  verses.  God  is  the  God  of  Arnold, 
and  trust  in  him  is  complete.  The  upshot  of  these 
exercises  in  self-searching  is  the  necessity  of  content- 
ment and  self-esteem  in  the  performance  of  daily 
tasks. 

"  To  KoXov  "  is  a  better  known  expression  of  the 
same  conclusion,  in  somewhat  more  philosophical 
form.  "  The  Summum  Pulchrum,"  Clough  assures 
us,  not  at  all  beautifully,  "  rests  in  heaven  above," 
and  will  some  day  become  visible  to  those  who  work 
hard.  More  interesting  is  "  The  Music  of  the  World 
and  of  the  Soul."  It  is  interesting  because  it  makes 
clear  a  curious  inversion,  or  seeming  inversion,  which 
the  Clough  of  these  years  came  quite  naturally  to 
make.     There  are  two  musics,  he  says : 

"  One  loud  and  bold  and  coarse. 
And  overpowering  still  perforce 
All  tone  and  tune  beside ; 
Yet  in  despite  its  pride 
Only  of  fumes  of  foolish  fancy  bred. 
And  sounding  solely  in  the  sounding  head  : 
The  other,  soft  and  low, 
Steahng  whence  we  not  know." 

The  first,  of  course,  the  music  of  the  world,  the  second 
of  the  soul.  But  to  Clough,  the  world  is  really 
Oxford,  sometimes  taken  to  be  the  principal  earthly 
manifestation  of  soul ;  and  by  what  he  calls  the  soul 
he  really  means  the  world.  Oxford  was  the  actual, 
soiled,  everyday  thing  ;  human  life  outside  the  walls, 


AS   UNDERGRADUATE  55 

the  divine  mystery — Oxford,  the  low  thing  ;  ordinary 
human  existence,  the  high.  To  remain  in  the 
University  was  to  be  cowardly,  to  go  out  was  to  be 
brave.  The  problem  was  complicated  by  considera- 
tions of  immediate  duty,  as  problems  always  are  ; 
but  it  remained  at  the  back  of  all  Clough's  thinking, 
until  he  finally  solved  it,  in  the  only  possible  way, 
by  leaving  Oxford. 

It  might  have  been  better  for  Clough  if  he  had 
gone  out  from  Oxford  immediately  upon  securing 
his  degree.  But  he  was  very  plainly  marked  for  a 
trial  at  least  of  the  academic  life.  He  had  no  special 
preparation,  and  no  interest  in  preparing  himself, 
for  any  other  profession  than  teaching.  He  was  too 
uncertain  of  his  beliefs  to  go  into  the  Church.  His 
family  was  too  poor  to  provide  him  with  a  good 
business  opening.  He  was  all  unready  for  the  world, 
from  ignorance  of  it,  from  over-development  of  his 
faculty  of  moral  criticism,  and  from  an  utter  lack 
of  esteem  for  the  tricks,  as  he  regarded  them,  of 
conduct  and  expression  which  were  the  only  means 
of  convincing  the  world  of  the  existence  in  himself  of 
the  unusual  powers  he  was  so  confident  he  possessed. 

A  strong  motive  of  a  positive  sort  for  remaining 
was  the  hope  of  redeeming  the  reputation  he  had  lost 
by  missing  his  First.  He  was  doomed  to  be  a  don  ; 
and  if  that  fate,  while  it  held  for  him,  intensified 
his  theological  worries  and  gave  him  an  unhappy 
feeling  of  repression,  it  gave  him  on  the  other  hand 
plenty  of  time  for  thinking  through  the  problems 


56  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

which  it  would  have  been  necessary  in  any  case 
for  him  to  think  through  before  he  could  attain 
anything  like  contentment. 

The  summer  after  his  examination  Clough  spent 
with  his  family  in  Liverpool,  occupying  himself 
with  some  private  pupils  sent  him  by  Dr.  Arnold. 
In  the  fall  he  returned  to  Oxford,  where  he  lived,  as 
he  had  been  hving,  on  his  scholarship  and  exhibition. 
He  tried  for  a  Balliol  fellowship  and  lost.  The 
disappointment  was  possibly  greater  than  the  dis- 
appointpient  of  the  spring.  The  force  of  such  blows 
to  youthful  self-esteem  is  cumulative  ;  and  while  the 
practical  value  of  a  First  was  uncertain,  to  miss  a 
fellowship  was  to  miss  an  assurance  of  a  steady  in- 
come. But  if  Clough  lost  spirit  to  any  extent  he 
recovered  sufficiently  to  win  in  a  competition  for  a 
fellowship  in  Oriel  the  next  spring.  A  place  on  the 
Oriel  foundation  must  have  been  little,  if  any,  less 
agreeable  to  him  than  a  place  in  his  own  college. 
Besides  having  a  name  in  scholarship  second  only 
to  that  of  BalUol,  Oriel  was  the  college  of  Dr. 
Arnold,  as  well  as  of  Newman,  and  there  came  to 
it  as  fellow  some  years  later  the  younger  Arnold. 
Principal  Shairp  records  that  Newman  assisted  in 
the  examination  of  Clough,  and  that  this  was  the 
last  examination  in  which  he  took  a  part.  To 
Clough  the  success  was  exceedingly  gratifying.  It 
removed  the  need  for  worry  about  his  immediate 
future  ;  but  it  was  still  more  valuable  as  a  vindi- 
cation. 


CHAPTER  IV 
AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL 

THE  external  life  that  Clough  led  at  Oxford  was 
as  placid  and  as  regular  as  his  inner  life  was 
intense  and  exceptional.  His  love  of  outdoor  living 
was  even  beyond  that  of  the  usual  Oxford  man,  but 
it  took  no  unusual  forms.  He  went  on  long  walks 
and  rowed  and  swam,  and  whenever  he  could,  spent 
a  week  or  a  month  or  a  season  in  the  hills  of  Wales 
or  Scotland.  These  enterprises  provided  him  with  a 
host  of  minor  experiences — glimpses  of  the  beauty  of 
nature,  unobstructed  revelations  of  the  soul  proces- 
ses of  his  companions,  moments  of  rare  acquiescence 
in  the  scheme  of  things  and  in  himself.  He  lacked 
the  impulse  to  isolate  an  occasional  incident  of  one 
of  these  varieties,  and  to  transmute  it  into  a  poem. 
His  short  pieces  are  abstract.  His  longer  poems,  on 
the  other  hand,  are  quite  full  of  his  minor  experiences, 
used  apparently  with  very  little  reshaping.  But 
there  was  nothing  in  his  own  experience  dramatic 
enough,  or  persistent  enough,  to  provide  a  connective 
principle  adequate  to  a  work  of  art.  Hence  in 
devising  a  plot  he  always  took  his  main  thread  from 
imagined  experience  which  under  the  circumstances 
provided  by  actual  minor  incidents  he  might  have 
met  with,  but  had  not  met  with.     So  in  The  Bothie 

37 


58  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

he  interests  himself  mainly  in  philanderings  and  more 
legitimate  affairs  with  Scottish  maidens,  although 
the  unanimous  indication  of  all  that  he  and  others 
wrote  about  his  Highland  sojourns  is  that  he  in- 
variably did  his  admiring  of  the  lassies  from  a  safe 
distance. 

All  his  life  Clough  had  admiring  friends,  in  whose 
eyes  he  cut  a  very  impressive  figure.  The  praises  of 
him  that  these  friends  published  after  his  death  were 
so  warm  as  to  produce  in  the  general  mind — always 
incredulous  on  such  points — rather  more  doubt 
than  certainty  of  his  excellences.  For  no  stage  of  his 
life  are  these  praises  warmer  than  for  the  time 
when  he  was  making  the  transition  from  scholar  to 
fellow.  He  was  not  nearly  so  widely  known  as  he  had 
been  at  Rugby.  His  insistence  on  holding  aloof 
from  the  Tractarian  struggle,  on  doing  his  thinking 
for  himself,  lost  him  his  opportunity  for  becoming 
a  University  celebrity.  But  in  his  own  college  he 
was  the  object  of  profound  respect,  most  of  it,  even 
from  those  who  were  then  and  afterward  his  best 
friends,  of  a  distant  kind.  He  was  looked  upon  as 
one  marked  for  greatness,  and  was  therefore,  of 
course,  something  of  a  joke  with  the  irreverent,  who 
yet,  for  all  their  flippancy,  appear  to  have  shared 
in  the  general  admiration  of  him. 

What  he  had  come  to  be  in  physical  appearance 
is  specifically  described  by  his  friend  the  poet  AUing- 
ham  :  "  Clough  was  five  feet  ten  in  height,  well  made, 
inclining  to  burliness  ;    he  had  a  handsome  frank 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  59 

face,  dark-eyed,  full-chinned  and  ruddy-complex- 
ioned,  the  nose  being  straight  and  rather  short  ; 
his  head,  which  was  early  bald,  ran  deep  from  front 
to  back,  and  showed  a  graceful  domed  outline." 
Other  descriptions  find  his  chin  irresolute  and 
his  mouth  sweet  rather  than  firm.  A  poetical  por- 
trait of  him  is  provided  by  Principal  Shairp,  in  the 
poem  "Balliol  Scholars"  which  he  wrote  in  1875  : 

"  Foremost  one  stood,  with  forehead  high  and  broad, — 
Sculptor  ne'er  moulded  grander  dome  of  thought, — 
Beneath  it,  eyes  dark-lustred  rolled  and  glowed, 

Deep  wells  of  feeling  where  the  full  soul  wrought ; 
Yet  lithe  of  limb,  and  strong  as  shepherd  boy. 
He  roamed  the  wastes  and  drank  the  mountain  joy. 
To  cool  a  heart  too  cruelly  distraught." 

In  a  prose  contribution  to  the  Memoir,  Shairp  men- 
tions massiveness  of  figure  as  one  of  the  strongest 
impressions  given  by  Clough.  His  health  and  vigour 
through  these  Oxford  years  were  exceptional.  A 
contributing  cause  for  the  slenderness  of  his  poetic 
product  may  be  detected  in  the  nature  and  extent 
of  his  physical  power,  which  was  of  a  sort  to  make 
for  a  measure  of  stolidity.  He  was  keen  and  taut, 
but  his  stimuli  came  from  within.  He  was  not 
extraordinarily  alive  to  impressions,  as  he  should 
have  been  satisfied  that  he  was  before  proposing 
to  himself  a  poetic  career.  And,  indeed,  poetry  ap- 
pears to  have  occupied  in  his  mind  a  place  definitely 
secondary  to  that  held  by  his  academic  occupations. 
Clough  loved  to  teach;  there  can  be  no  doubt  of 
that.    The  didactic  impulse  had  been  strong  in  him 


6o  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

from  the  age  of  fourteen  or  so.  But  it  impelled  in 
these  maturer  years  a  very  different  sort  of  teaching. 
To  the  younger  boys  at  Rugby  Clough  had  laboured  to 
impart  a  quite  positive  and  definite  religious  and 
moral  dogma.  At  Oxford  his  point  of  view  was  criti- 
cal, and  more  and  more  sceptical ;  his  method,  how- 
ever, only  very  cautiously  socratic.  Not  even  with 
his  friends,  much  less  with  his  pupils,  does  he  seem 
to  have  pressed  his  attack  on  an  opinion  which  seemed 
to  him  false  much  farther  than  by  a  mild  question 
or  two  to  instil  an  initial  doubt  of  it.  Yet  such  was 
the  impression  he  gave  of  sound  judgment  and  of  a 
reserved  store  of  argument  that  even  so  gentle  an 
assault  on  error  seems  in  many  cases  to  have  been 
singularly  effective.  "  Several  survivors,"  says  Mr. 
Bagehot,  "  may  think  they  owe  much  to  Mr.  Clough's 

quiet  question,  '  Ah,  then  you  think ?  '  " 

The  work  done  in  the  school  of  Litterae  Humaniores 
at  Oxford  was,  and  is,  extraordinarily  remote  from 
the  facts  and  principles  of  actual  life.  If  this  had 
not  been  true,  Clough  would  probably  have  enjoyed 
still  less  peace  of  mind  during  his  work  at  Oriel.  His 
hypertrophied  conscience  felt  keenly  the  fact  that 
he  was  employed  by  an  institution  closely  connected 
with  the  Church.  If  his  duties  had  involved  much 
discussion  of  living  opinions  in  reUgion  and  poUtics, 
that  conscience  would  never  have  permitted  him 
to  undermine  by  questioning  opinions  which  he  was 
bound  not  to  oppose  directly.  As  it  was  his  tutorial 
hours  concerned  themselves  with  Thucydides,  and 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  6i 

the  Athenian  Tragedy,  and  Latin  Prose  Composition. 
Even  so  the  time  came  soon  enough  when  Clough 
was  to  feel  his  formal  adherence  to  the  religion  of 
his  college  as  an  unendurable  restraint  on  his  mental 
activity. 

There  were  other  forces  than  love  of  the  tutor's 
task  which  operated  to  hold  Clough  at  Oxford.  In 
the  first  place,  inertia,  a  very  strong  argument 
indeed  with  a  man  who  made  decisions  with  such 
great  difficulty.  Then  he  loved  Oxford.  Unlike 
most  poets,  he  did  his  living  in  the  world  actually 
about  him,  and  not  in  any  world  of  dreams.  The 
objects  of  his  emotions,  so  far  as  they  were  persons 
and  places  at  all,  were  real  persons  and  places. 
Oxford  did  not  have  to  suffer  by  comparison  with 
any  city  of  the'sun  or  of  the  moon.  Third,  he  saw 
himself  as  a  player,  though  an  humble  one,  of  the 
intellectual  game  ;  and  the  desire  was  natural  to 
remain  on  the  field  where,  for  England,  that  game 
was  being  played  most  zealously. 

But  all  of  these  bonds  might  not  have  held  Clough 
at  Oxford  year  after  year  had  not  the  need  of  money 
which  first  led  him  to  work  for  a  fellowship  been 
aggravated,  not  lessened,  by  the  course  of  events. 
His  father  failed  in  business  in  1841,  and  lost  most 
of  his  money.  It  became  necessary  for  Mrs.  Clough 
and  her  daughter  to  do  most  of  their  own  house- 
hold work.  The  responsibility  fell  upon  Arthur 
Clough  of  keeping  up  some  part  of  the  expenses,  as 
well  as  the  courage  and  happiness  of  his  people.     The 


62  ARTHUk  HUGH  CLOlJGH 

family  had  experience  of  death  in  these  years  as 
well  as  of  poverty.  In  1842  the  youngest  son, 
George,  went  out  to  Charleston  on  his  father's  busi- 
ness, and  after  only  a  few  months  there  was  taken 
sick  of  the  fever  and  died.  The  father  had  sailed 
for  America  a  short  time  after  the  son,  and  with  no 
knowledge  of  his  illness.  He  was  met  at  Boston 
with  the  news  of  his  loss,  which  affected  him  so 
heavily  as  to  hasten  his  own  end.  The  boy  was  only 
twenty-two,  and  he  was  particularly  bright  and 
engaging.  He  had  suffered  his  last  illness  far  from 
home.  Furthermore,  he  had  been  counted  on  to 
straighten  out  the  increasing  business  difficulties  of 
his  father.  The  elder  Mr.  Clough  returned  to  England 
in  the  summer  of  1843,  grief  stricken  and  ill ;  and 
after  months  of  helplessness  died  in  November  of 
the  next  5/ear. 

Through  this  unhappy  period  Clough  spent  much  of 
his  time  at  home.  The  house  at  Liverpool  remained 
a  home  to  him  in  the  fullest  sense.  Loving  reality 
always,  he  found  more  of  it  in  domestic  life  than  in 
academic.  He  did  not  avert  his  attention  from 
poverty  and  grief  and  death  ;  nor  did  he  allow  them 
to  unsettle  his  nerves,  or  bring  about  any  sudden 
changes  in  his  way  of  looking  at  life.  Yet  it  is  quite 
evident  that  the  sorrows  and  anxieties  of  this  time 
affected  him  profoundly.  His  mind  seized  on  the 
problems  of  mortality  and  evil  that  they  presented, 
not  to  cast  them  aside  in  pain,  not  to  conceal  them 
under  some  elaborate  metaphysical  ornamentation, 


AS  FELLOW  OF   ORIEL  63 

not  to  dispose  of  them  by  any  hasty  imperative,  but 
to  turn  them  over  and  over,  to  regard  them  steadily 
and  from  every  possible  angle,  and  in  the  end  to 
profess  only  to  have  become  used  to  them,  not  to 
have  become  master  of  theni. 

Anne  Jemima  Clough  kept  a  journal  through  these 
years,  which  is  printed,  in  part,  in  a  Memoir  of  her 
by  her  niece.  In  this  journal  Miss  Clough  speaks 
often  of  her  brother,  and  always  very  lovingly  and 
admiringly.  Nothing  delights  her  so  much  as  his 
homecomings,  nothing  strengthens  her  so  much  as 
his  counsels.  "He  is  the  comfort  and  joy  of  my 
life,"  she  writes  ;  "  it  is  for  him  and  from  him  that 
I  am  incited  to  seek  after  all  that  is  lovely  and  of 
good  report.  Preach  no  sermons,  give  no  precepts, 
but  set  before  me  a  holy,  beautiful  example,  and 
my  heart  will  burn  within  me,  and  1  shall  surely 
long  and  strive  to  follow  it."  The  journal  reveals 
Miss  Clough  as  no  less  resolute  than  her  brother  in 
searching  for  the  right  way  of  life.  She  decided  early 
that  the  way  for  her  would  not  be  the  usual  way 
for  women.  There  were  not  then  many  good 
examples  for  a  woman  to  follow  in  seeking  to  do  a 
work  of  her  own  in  the  world,  not  many  women  to  go 
to  for  advice.  And  so  Miss  Clough  set  her  brother 
to  thinking  about  the  subject  of  woman's  work. 
They  talked  about  it  a  great  deal.  They  were 
together  not  only  in  Clough' s  holidays  at  home, 
but  during  visits  his  sister  made  him  at  Oxford  and 
on  journeys  in  which  she  accompanied  him.     He  took 


64  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

her  through  the  Lake  country  one  summer,  and  in 
1846  to  Europe.  They  went  up  the  Rhine  to 
Switzerland,  and  spent  some  time  among  the  Italian 
lakes. 

The  deaths  of  a  father  and  of  a  brother  were  pre- 
ceded by  another  great  loss,  felt  perhaps  no  less 
poignantly.  Dr.  Arnold  died  quite  suddenly  in  1842, 
at  the  early  age  of  forty -seven.  "  He  was  for  a 
long  time  more  than  a  father  to  me,"  said  Clough  ; 
and  left  Oxford  on  hearing  the  news,  and  went  home, 
and  thence  to  the  Welsh  hills  for  a  period  of  solitary 
wandering.  This  was  a  death  to  have  the  strongest 
effect  on  his  thinking  ;  for  the  life  it  ended  in  its 
prime  must  still  have  appeared  to  him  the  most 
unquestionably  useful  life  in  all  England.  It  had 
this  particular  effect  on  his  thinking,  that  it  left  him 
alone  in  the  world  as  no  other  death  could  have  done. 
Love  of  Dr.  Arnold  was  a  powerful  chain  holding 
him  to  some  sort  of  conformity  with  the  Church,  and 
to  a  feeling  of  obligation  to  bring  honour  to  Rugby 
in  some  one  of  the  conventional  ways.  The  breaking 
of  the  chain  not  so  much  set  Clough  free  to  go  his 
own  way,  as  enforced  on  him  the  necessity  of  finding 
a  way  that  could  be  his  own. 

"  I  am,  right  or  wrong,"  writes  Clough  in  one  of 
the  letters  of  this  time, "  as  a  matter  of  fact,  ex- 
ceedingly averse  to  act  on  anything  but  what  I  have 
got  from  myself."  The  record  of  his  life  at  Oxford 
is  a  record  of  progressive  isolation  of  spirit.  It  is 
the  sad  experience  of  most  men  that  solitary  con- 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  65 

finement  is  an  established  principle  in  the  prison 
whose  shades  close  so  rapidly  on  the  growing  boy. 
But  Clough  deliberately  sought  to  isolate  himself. 
From  being  a  passionate  disciple  he  became  a 
passionate  individualist.  This  individualism,  how- 
ever, was  in  itself  a  discipleship.  Clough  had  heard 
the  great  voice  of  Carlyle.  There  inhered  in  the 
message  of  that  voice  an  effective  veto  on  any  out- 
ward profession  of  discipleship  on  the  part  of  one 
who  really  heard  it  and  accepted  it.  For  no  one 
really  hears  and  accepts  the  recommendation  to  the 
many,  to  be  disciples  :  what  every  one  attends  to 
is  the  lesson  to  the  few — to  be  heroic,  and  to  think 
for  oneself.  If  Jones  is  persuaded  by  Smith  to  do 
his  thinking  for  himself,  it  is  in  the  nature  of  the 
case  that  for  him  to  call  Smith  Master  would  be  a  poor 
way  of  expressing  his  gratitude.  Hence  we  do  not 
find  Clough  commending  Carlyle' s  books  in  his  letters, 
nor  talking  about  Old  Clothes  and  Great  Silent  Men. 
Yet  the  most  satisfactory  understanding  of  Clough 's 
singular  inaction  and  watchfulness  in  these  years  is 
to  be  gained  by  seeing  that  he  was  proposing  to  be 
himself  a  Great  Silent  Man,  and  that  while  he  ap- 
peared to  be  doing  nothing,  he  was  in  fact  sedulously 
ridding  his  spirit  of  its  Old  Clothes,  and  preparing 
himself,  alas,  in  vain,  for  the  pealing  through  all 
the  recesses  of  his  being  of  his  own  "  Everlasting 
Yea." 

R.  H.  Hutton,  who  knew  Clough,  insists,  in  a  maga- 
zine article  which  he  wrote  about  him,  and  later 


66  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

reprinted,  on  the  great  importance  of  this  Carlylean 
influence.  He  says  it  was  Carlyle's  injunction  to 
men  to  clear  their  lives  of  misleading  pretensions 
that  led  Clough  to  leave  Oxford  ;  and  to  show  that 
Clough  ultimately  became  dissatisfied  with  the  Silent 
Man  theory  of  life,  he  quotes  him  as  saying  :  "  Car- 
lyle  led  us  out  into  the  wilderness  and  left  us  there." 
This  appears  to  have  been  a  favourite  remark  with 
Clough  :  he  made  it  also  to  Emerson,  when  he  was 
seeing  him  off  for  America  at  the  Liverpool  docks 
in  1848.  And  Emerson  told  Edward  Everett  Hale 
that  many  other  young  Englishmen  had  said  the 
same  thing  to  him. 

Up  to  the  time  when  he  found  himself  thus  left 
in  the  wilderness,  Clough  followed  very  faithfully. 
He  was  one  of  a  number  that  is  fortunately  very 
small,  in  carrying  his  devotion  to  the  point  of 
writing  Carlylese.  He  does  this  sometimes  in  his 
letters,  but  very  notably  in  a  pamphlet  which  he 
published  in  1847  on  the  subject  of  Retrenchment 
(of  private  expenses)  at  Oxford  :  "  Who  wants  ices 
with  the  wind  N.N.E.  ;  who  likes  Nuneham  or 
Godstowe  in  the  rain  ?  When  all  the  watering-pots 
of  heaven  are  playing  upon  High  Street,  there  will 
hardly  be  a  quorum  for  examining  one's  toilet. 
With  the  roses  and  the  May  will  come  out,  I  greatly 
fear,  the  champagne  and  the  claret. — For  my  own 
part,  if  the  corn  could  only  ripen  in  it,  I  could  wish 
for  rain  and  cold  to  the  end  of  the  chapter."  In 
a  following  paragraph  he  expresses  a  fear  that  in  this 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  (ij 

passage  rhetoric  has  led  him  astray  "into  the  Hmbo 
of  the  factitious."  And  indeed  it  has  led  him 
astray  throughout  the  article.  He  cannot  rise  to  the 
immense  contempt  which  Carlyle  would  have  felt 
for  undergraduate  claret  and  waistcoats  and  Ireland 
starving.  He  is  left  hanging,  only  half-way  up  from 
the  much  gentler  sarcasm  that  was  his  own  style 
of  humour. 

Humour,  however,  whether  in  his  own  style  or 
another's — and  in  so  far  as  he  ever  possessed  any  of 
it — was  to  develop  in  Clough  later.  Certainly  it 
played  very  little  part  in  the  aU- too-serious  life  which 
he  led  at  Oxford.  And  his  prose  style  was  not  then, 
nor  did  it  ever  become,  a  matter  of  significance,  aside 
from  its  betrayal  of  the  influence  under  which  he  was 
doing  his  thinking.  His  artistic  interest  was  in 
verse,  and  in  verse  of  the  soberest,  least  humorous 
kind.  There  is  not  much  of  this  verse — only  some 
score  of  short  pieces.  Clough  gathered  them  up  at 
the  end  of  his  stay  at  Oxford,  and  printed  them, 
together  with  some  of  his  earlier  poems,  in  a  volume 
called  Ambarvalia  which  he  got  out  in  1849  ^^ 
connection  with  his  old  Rugby  friend,  the  Reverend 
Thomas  Burbidge.  These  Oxford  poems  of  Clough's 
• — except  indeed  for  one  piece  written  in  honour  of 
a  silver  wedding — have  nothing  whatever  to  do  with 
the  outside  world.  They  are  purely  introspective. 
There  are  only  two  subjects  :  half  of  them  are 
about  Duty,  and  the  other  half  about  God. 

It  is  some  of  the  ethical  poems  that  are  most  read 


68  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to-day  ;  but  for  a  study  of  Clough  himself  the 
rehgious  poems  are  the  more  mteresting.  There  are 
three  of  these  last  that  are  particularly  fine.  All 
three  voice  the  same  notion  of  God ;  all  ring  with 
the  same  intensity  of  feeling,  the  same  immense 
sincerity.  The  view  of  God  is  that  of  a  spirit  dwelling 
in  the  human  spirit.  The  feeling  is  that  passionate 
straining  after  nobler  things  which  was  inculcated 
in  Clough  by  his  mother  and  then  strengthened  by  the 
successive  influences  of  Arnold  and  Newman  and 
Carlyle.  In  the  sincerity  there  is  perhaps  to  be 
seen  much  that  was  peculiar  to  Clough' s  individual 
temperament :  this,  for  instance,  that  he  thought 
too  much  about  the  final  outcome  of  his  search  for 
truth — worried  about  it ;  and  this  worry  interfered 
with  the  search,  as  lessening  the  amount  and  the 
coolness  of  the  attention  he  had  left  to  bestow  on 
the  particular  successive  steps  of  it.  Yet  it  is  the 
need  for  cool  deliberation  that  he  is  always  talking 
about. 

In  the  first  of  these  poems,  "  The  New  Sinai  " 
(1845),  Clough  is  crying  out  his  scorn  of  man's  weak 
desire  to  see  his  god  in  first  this  and  then  that  person 
or  thing  in  the  phenomenal  world.  Once,  on  Sinai, 
God  had  rebuked  this  frailty,  saying,  "  I  am  One." 
But  the  lesson  went  unheeded  : 

"  And  baby-thoughts  again,  again. 
Have  dogged  the  growing  man." 

Man's  present  need  is  resolutely  to  reject  all  that 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  69 

remain  of  the  long  line  of  man-created  images  of  God 
— and  create  a  new  and  better  image,  would  be 
Carlyle's  message,  but  Clough  insists  on  a  termination 
of  the  image-building  process.  Once  more  God  will 
speak  authoritatively  to  man,  but  out  of  man's 
own  spirit,  if  man  will  but  prepare  that  spirit. 
Meanwhile, 

"  And  wait  it  out,  O  Man  !  " 
is  Clough's  counsel.  There  is  a  singular  resemblance 
at  this  point  between  the  position  of  the  over-intel- 
lectual Oxford  tutor  and  that  of  the  untaught  Primi- 
tive Methodist  or  Seventh  Day  Adventist.  The  one 
was  as  sure  in  his  mind  as  the  other  is  in  his  heart 
of  a  Second  Coming.  As  violent,  almost,  as  the 
emotional  fanaticism  which  he  had  been  taught  to 
hate,  was  Clough's  old  Rugbeian  faith  in  the  efficacy 
of  clear  and  clean  religious  thinking.  One  thing, 
at  any  rate,  that  thinking  had  now  established. 
Clough's  old  debate  with  himself  over  the  possibility 
of  accepting  by  an  act  of  the  will  such  a  God  as 
Newman's  was  finally  settled.  Already  in  1843 
Clough  had  had  great  difficulty  in  bringing  himself 
to  sign  the  Articles.  His  willingness  to  associate 
himself  with  any  form  of  dogma  became  from  that 
time  steadily  less  and  less. 

r  The  second  of  these  poems,  "  Qui  Laborat,  Orat," 
has  the  distinction,  first  of  all,  of  showing  the  very 
best  that  Clough  could  do  in  the  way  of  expression 
— and  that  best,  in  a  rather  unambitious  way,  very 
good  indeed.     It  is  one  of  the  great  Victorian  poems. 


70  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

It  succeeds  in  stating  quite  plainly,  and  with  no 
single  unnecessary  word,  a  sequence  of  profound,  yet 
simple,  ideas  ;  and  at  the  same  time  in  attaining 
a  severe  but  beautiful  melody  to  convey  the  deep 
emotional  quality  which  inheres  in  those  ideas.  It 
was  several  times  rewritten,  but  dashed  off  in  the 
first  instance,  as  Thomas  Arnold  tells,  during  the 
hours  of  a  sleepless  night  which  Clough  passed  at 
Arnold's  London  lodgings  after  a  long  evening's 
talk  with  him  on  the  subject  of  prayer. 

It  seems  quite  unlikely  that  Carlyle's  great  exhorta- 
tion in  Past  and  Present  to  labour  as  the  best  sort 
of  prayer  can  have  been  out  of  Qough's  mind  when 
he  wrote  his  verses.  Past  and  Present  had  just 
been  printed  :  of  course  Clough  had  been  reading  it. 
It  is  not  at  all  true,  however,  that  he  simply  makes 
poetry  of  Carlyle's  prose.  His  statement,  indeed,  is 
so  much  the  clearer,  and  cooler,  and  more  logical 
of  the  two  that  it  might  at  least  as  well  be  said  that 
he  makes  prose  of  Carlyle's  poetry.  But  with  each 
man  it  is  true  that  both  idea  and  form  are  poetic, 
though  the  difference  in  idea  is  only  less  great  than 
the  difference  in  form.  Clough' s  argument  for  wor- 
ship through  work  is  quite  another  thing  from 
Carlyle's  argument.  To  work  is  to  pray  with  Carlyle, 
because  it  is  the  bravest,  hardest,  spiritually  whole- 
somest  thing  a  man  may  do  ;  but  with  Clough, 
because  it  is  that  thing  a  man  may  do  which  is  least 
likely  to  be  bold,  to  be  profane,  or  to  be — ^horror 
of  horrors,  always — factitious  : 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  71 

"  With  eye  down-dropt,  if  then  this  earthly  mind 
Speechless  remain,  or  speechless  e'en  depart ; 
Nor  seek  to  see — for  what  of  earthly  kind 
Can  see  Thee  as  Thou  art  ? 

If  well  assured  'tis  but  profanely  bold 
In  thought's  abstractest  forms  to  seem  to  see  ; 

It  dare  not  dare  the  dread  communion  hold 
In  ways  unworthy  Thee. 

O  not  unowned  Thou  shalt  unnamed  forgive. 
In  worldly  walks  the  prayerless  heart  prepare  ; 

And  if  in  work  its  life  it  seem  to  live, 
Shalt  make  that  work  be  prayer." 

Not  inferior  are  the  verses  to  which  Clough  gave 
the  name  "  vf^vof^  dfivo<;,"  He  himself,  never  incUned 
to  value  his  own  works  very  highly  nor  very  long, 
seems  to  have  been  well  pleased  with  this  work.  At 
any  rate  he  writes  of  it,  from  America,  at  least  four 
or  five  years  later,  to  the  lady  who  was  to  become 
his  wife :  "  It  wants  a  good  deal  of  mending  as  it 
stands,  but  it  is  on  the  whole  in  sense  very  satisfactory 
to  me  still."  It  received  the  mending,  and  stands 
as  an  excellent  example  of  the  perfect  straightfor- 
wardness and  sincerity  of  Clough' s  style  : 

"  O  Thou,  in  that  mysterious  shrine 
Enthroned,  as  I  must  say,  divine  ! 
I  will  not  frame  one  thought  of  what 
Thou  mayest  either  be  or  not. 
I  will  not  prate  of  '  thus  '  and  '  so,' 
And  be  profane  with  '  yes  '  and  '  no,' 
Enough  that  in  our  soul  and  heart 
Thou,  whatsoe'er  Thou  mayest  be,  art." 

In   connection   with   his  frequent   exhortations   to 

action  it  strikes  a  reader  continually  that  Clough  did 


72  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

not  practise  what  he  preached  ;  but  the  resolution 
about  his  thinking  which  he  here  makes  he  seems 
to  have  kept  pretty  well.  Having  framed,  up  to 
this  time  in  his  life,  an  altogether  exceptional  num- 
ber of  thoughts  about  the  nature  of  God,  and  having 
reached,  at  any  rate,  a  considerable  number  of 
negative  conclusions,  he  brought  this  research  at 
last  almost,  if  not  quite,  to  an  end.  It  only  remained 
for  him  to  doubt  whether  there  is  any  god  at  all  of 
any  sort.  This  doubt  Clough  was  to  experience 
in  full  force  ;  for  several  years  his  mind  was  full  of 
it.  A  modus  vivendi  resulted,  in  time,  which  con- 
sisted in  refusing  to  admit  any  validity  to  any  man's 
way  of  conceiving  God,  refusing  to  formulate  any 
new  way  of  conceiving  God,'  and  yet  living  always 
and  talking  sometimes  in  the  manner  of  a  devout 
believer  in  God. 

The  only  thing  peculiar  to  himself  about  this 
position  of  Clough' s  was  the  extreme  arduousness  of 
the  path  by  which  he  arrived  at  it.  His  God  had 
been  Arnold's  God,  really,  all  the  time — the  God  of 
most  of  the  thoughtful  members  of  the  great  Latitu- 
dinarian  section  of  the  Church,  with  their  poverty  of 
dogma  and  their  fine  wealth  of  Christian  feehng. 
He  was  the  God  of  the  Unitarians,  and  of  many 
of  the  Independents ;  Clough  recognized  his  own 
congeniality  with  the  best  Nonconformist  thinking, 
and  mentions  in  one  or  two  of  his  letters  more  or  less 
serious  notions  that  possessed  him  at  times  of  becom- 
ing an  Independent  parson.    But  whereas  most  of 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  73 

those  who  held  this  substantially  identical  theology 
had  adopted  it  with  their  eyes  resolutely  averted 
from  the  central  mystery  to  problems  of  conduct 
and  to  opportunities  for  carefully  controlled  emotion, 
Clough  had  faced  and  travelled  straight  forward. 
Brave  and  patient  and  pure  of  heart,  he  had  fought 
his  way  on.  He  had  gone  as  far  toward  finding  God 
as  a  citizen  of  his  age,  travelling  by  the  intellect, 
could  go.  And  now  that  he  had  come  to  the  end, 
there  was  a  certain  flatness,  hardly  less  disconcerting 
for  the  fact  that  he  had  partly  anticipated  it,  about 
the  goal  which  he  had  reached.  He  felt  as  Admiral 
Peary  may  well  have  felt  in  coming  upon  a  North 
Pole  which  was  after  all  only  a  point  to  be  approxi- 
mately ascertained  in  a  field  of  ice  quite  devoid  of 
landmarks.  Nothing  remained  for  either  explorer 
to  do  except  to  turn  back  to  more  habitable  regions 
— back  to  a  temperate  zone,  where  the  business  of 
living  was  actually  being  carried  on  without  much 
dependence  on  the  nature  of  ultimate  things,  either 
terrestrial  or  spiritual. 

Clough  states  this  religious  position  of  his  very 
candidly  in  a  letter  to  his  sister  written  from  Oxford 
in  1847.  He  gets  into  the  subject  through  talk  of 
reading  Coleridge.  "  My  own  feeling,"  he  writes, 
"  does  not  go  along  with  Coleridge  in  attributing 
any  special  virtue  to  the  facts  of  Gospel  history.  .  .  . 
And  I  do  not  think  that  doubts  respecting  the  facts 
related  in  the  gospels  need  give  us  much  trouble.  .  .  . 
Trust  in  God's  justice  and  love,  and  belief  in  His 


74  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

commands  as  written  in  our  conscience,  stand  un- 
shaken, though  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke,  and  John,  or 
even  St.  Paul,  were  to  fall."  Later  in  the  letter, 
in  answer  to  his  own  question,  "  What  is  the  meaning 
of  '  Atonement  by  a  crucified  Saviour '  ?  "  he  says: 
"  That  there  may  be  a  meaning  in  it,  which  shall 
not  only  be  consistent  with  God's  justice,  that  is, 
with  the  voice  of  our  conscience,  but  shall  be  the 
very  perfection  of  that  justice,  the  one  true  expression 
of  our  relations  to  God,  I  don't  deny  ;  but  I  do  deny 
that  Mr.  M'Neile,  or  Mr.  Close,  or  Dr.  Hook,  or 
Pusey,  or  Newman  himself,  quite  know  what  to 
make  of  it.  The  Evangelicals  gabble  at  it,  as  the 
Papists  do  their  Ave  Marys,  and  yet  say  they  know  ; 
while  Newman  falls  down  and  worships  because  he 
does  not  know,  and  knows  he  does  not  know."  And 
of  his  own  attitude :  "  If  I  am  not  born  with  the  power 
to  discover  "  (Clough's  belated  disillusionment  con- 
sisted in  his  acceptance  of  the  fact  that  he  lacked 
this  power),  "  I  will  do  what  I  can  with  what  know- 
ledge I  have — trust  to  God's  justice,  and  neither 
pretend  to  know,  nor,  without  knowing,  pretend  to 
embrace  :  nor  yet  oppose  those  who,  by  whatever 
means,  are  increasing  or  trying  to  increase  know- 
ledge." A  little  harsh,  perhaps,  are  the  references 
to  Newman  and  the  Evangelicals;  Yet  considering 
the  long  predominance  of  his  religious  feeUng,  and 
the  intensity  of  his  old  hope  of  finding  God,  the 
amount  of  bitterness  of  spirit  in  the  Clough  of  these 
years  cannot  but  be  regarded  as  admirably  slight. 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  75 

and  admirably  controlled.  There  is  no  defiance  in 
his  rejection  of  the  accepted  faiths,  no  setting  up  of 
a  counter-dogma,  no  closed-mindedness.  On  the 
contrary,  the  succeeding  period  of  his  life  shows  a 
very  rapid  increase  in  him  of  tolerance,  of  openness 
of  mind,  of  humanity. 

An  interesting  ethical  parallel  to  this  widening 
down  of  his  religious  feeUng  is  to  be  found  in  Clough's 
treatment  in  another  letter  of  the  same  month  of  a 
problem  of  discipline  which  his  sister  had  submitted 
to  him.  She  had  been  grieved  by  the  appearance 
of  petty  stealing  among  the  children  of  her  school. 
Clough  argues  the  matter  very  gravely,  urging  especi- 
ally that  pilfering  is  natural  to  children.  He  goes 
on  to  tell,  with  a  singular  naivete  for  a  man  of  twenty- 
eight  addressing  another  adult,  that  he  has  a  friend 
who  stole  a  book  from  a  shop  while  he  was  a  school- 
boy and  has  never  returned  it,  but  has  kept  it 
openly  on  his  shelves,  letting  his  friends  know  how 
he  came  by  it.  "  Well,"  comments  the  erstwhile 
moral  Clough,  "  I  don't  think  worse  of  him  on  the 
whole  for  this  ;  I  respect  him  for  his  present  frank- 
ness ;  and  though  I  think  he  ought  to  have  gone 
afterwards  and  told  the  bookseller,  and  paid  him, 
yet  I  don't  think  it's  very  much  matter."  To  such 
a  pass  had  the  slack  life  of  Oxford  brought  a  sterling 
Rugby  conscience  !  It  was  yet  not  so  far  gone  but 
that  Clough  shuddered  somewhat  at  his  own  de- 
pravity. He  has  the  grace  to  apologize  for  his  ad- 
vice, "  which  I  dare  say,  or  rather  I  am  sure,  mother, 


1 
76  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

and  I  dare  say  you  will  not  think  quite  high-prin- 
cipled." 

This  liberalization  of  Clough's  ideas  was  not,  so 
far  as  his  writings  show,  either  produced  or  attended 
by  any  strengthening  of  his  sense  of  humour.  Up 
to  the  last  of  his  Oxford  days  he  took  himself  and  his 
problems  with  complete  seriousness.  Or  if  the  scep- 
tical second  self  which  interested  him  so  much  later 
existed  also  in  this  earlier  time,  it  did  not  at  any 
rate  find  expression.  Clough  did  not  yet  allow  a 
place  in  his  mind  to  the  mocking  spirit  which  broke 
out  in  Dipsychus.  It  was  not  mockery  but  earnest 
thinking  which  brought  about  his  slow  decline  from 
the  highest  transcendentalism.  Yet  this  is  not  to  say 
that  his  Oxford  experience  was  made  up  of  nothing 
but  high  thinking.  The  life  of  a  don  was  not  without 
its  amenities  even  in  those  days  of  bitter  controversy. 
And  in  Clough's  later  years  at  the  University  religi- 
ous excitement  had  so  far  died  down  as  to  permit 
of  a  general  reawakening  of  interest  in  such  things 
as  politics,  and  social  theories,  and  foreign  affairs, 
and  the  arts — an  awakening  which  Clough  shared 
in  a  manner  that  was  very  important  for  his  own 
Hfe  if  not  for  the  life  of  the  community. 

Clough's  new  interest  in  affairs  found  expression 
in  his  talk  and  his  letters,  of  course,  but  also  in  the 
activities  of  a  small  but  distinguished  debating 
society  called  the  Decade.  This  society  appears  to 
have  been  made  up  mainly  of  young  Fellows  of 
Oriel  and  Balliol.     It  was  founded  in  1840,  with  a 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  77 

membership  limited  to  ten  ;  this  limit  was  later 
disregarded,  and  yet  through  the  entire  ten  years 
that  the  society  lasted  it  had  scarcely  thirty  members. 
Some  of  these  members  were  Jowett,  Tait,  Church, 
John  Duke  Coleridge,  Thomas  and  Matthew  Arnold, 
Shairp,  Conington,  Chichester  Fortescue,  F.  T.  Pal- 
grave,  and  Arthur  Stanley.  Of  these  men  Church, 
Thomas  Arnold,  Shairp,  Conington,  Palgrave,  Stan- 
ley, and  Coleridge  have  written  reminiscences  of  the 
work  of  the  society  ;  and  all  agree  that  to  Clough 
belonged  a  considerable  prestige — indeed  one  of  them 
says  definitely  the  first  place — ^in  its  debates. 
Stately,  severe,  deeply  suggestive,  deliberate,  negli- 
gent of  rhetorical  flow,  poetic  in  thought,  possessed 
of  a  firm  hold  on  reality,  serene,  original,  and,  of 
course,  convincing — these  are  a  few  of  the  flattering 
characteristics  ascribed  to  his  manner  of  speaking. 
Accounts  of  particular  discussions  in  which  he  shared 
indicate  more  than  anything  else  the  ability  of  a 
Hamlet  to  see  quite  too  many  sides  of  a  question 
ever  to  reach  any  effective  decision.  He  is  sure  of 
one  thing — that  Wordsworth  is  a  greater  poet  than 
Tennyson ;  and  he  supports  philosophically  the 
abstract  and  obvious  proposition  that  the  manu- 
facturing interest,  in  view  of  its  increase,  should  have 
increased  political  recognition.  But  on  most  issues 
he  is  set  down  as  "  neither  for  nor  against,"  as  "  sup- 
porting in  part,"  or  as  "  supporting  with  qualifica- 
tions." And  when  he  combats  laissez-faire,  it  is 
"  with  moderation." 


78  ARTHUR   HUGH  CLOUGH 

What  all  of  this  comes  to  is  that  Clough  was,  as 
yet,  indecisive.  He  was  still  doing  his  living  on  the 
inside  of  his  own  head.  He  was  learning  a  good 
many  facts  and  theories  about  the  real  life  of  the 
world,  but  he  was  using  them  only  as  pieces  and 
pawns  in  his  own  little  intellectual  game,  in  his  own 
private  search  for  his  own  private  truth.  He  was 
completely  intellectualist — ^not  in  the  least  the 
pragmatist  that  he  was  later,  in  part  at  any  rate, 
to  become.  He  had  no  real  appreciation  as  yet  of 
the  importance  of  movement.  He  talked  about  the 
prime  necessity  of  action,  but  he  really  regarded 
action  all  the  time  as  quite  secondary  to  thought. 
Action  was  a  sort  of  drug  by  which  pain  could  be 
minimized  during  the  long  lapses  between  steps  in 
the  slow  ascent  of  thinking.  The  test  of  the  man,  as 
well  as  the  man  himself,  lay  in  the  individual  con- 
science. The  "  objective,"  to  use  the  old  words, 
could  play  only  a  deceptively  real  part  in  a  world  so 
completely  "  subjective.'* 

Clough' s  friendships  were  not  of  a  sort  to  provide 
correctives  for  the  defects  in  this  way  of  taking 
life.  A  few  of  the  members  of  the  Decade  un- 
doubtedly proved  themselves  later  to  be  worthy  of 
the  name  of  men  of  action.  But  most  of  them  were 
definitely  men  of  reflection,  and  became  tutors  or 
heads  of  colleges,  or  clergymen.  The  men  of  this 
latter  sort  were  likely  to  be  Clough' s  intimates.  The 
younger  Thomas  Arnold  says  that  after  he  came  up 
to  Oxford  "  a  little  interior  company  "  was  formed 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  79 

containing  himself  and  his  brother  Matthew,  Theodore 
Walrond,  and  Clough.  They  went  skiffing  and 
walking  together,  breakfasted  together  every  Sunday, 
and  talked  together  about  Ireland  and  the  Corn 
Laws  and  Sir  Robert  Peel.  It  was  an  only  too 
congenial  group.  Walrond  seems  to  have  been  still 
more  excessively  conscientious,  still  more  Rugbeian, 
than  either  of  the  young  Arnolds.  He  had  been  head- 
boy  at  Rugby,  and  had  come  up  to  the  University, 
as  Balliol  Scholar,  as  late  as  1842.  Furthermore, 
Clough,  as  the  oldest,  would  be  much  more  likely 
to  affect  the  rest  of  the  group  than  to  be  affected 
by  them,  even  at  those  points,  if  there  were  any, 
at  which  their  characters  differed  at  all  strikingly 
from  his  own. 

Considered  in  itself,  and  not  as  a  preparation  for 
the  struggles  of  the  great  world,  the  life  led  by  this 
little  circle  was  beautiful  enough — as  no  one  who 
carries  the  images  of  "  Thyrsis  "  and  "  The  Scholar- 
Gypsy  "  in  mind  will  be  inchned  to  dispute.  Blessed 
in  spite  of  the  keenness  of  their  disappointments,  are 
the  pure  in  heart — at  any  rate  for  so  long  as  they 
remain  in  their  twenties.  And  here  were  four  to 
increase  their  enjoyment  of  an  unusual  degree  of 
this  state  of  blessedness  by  sharing  it ;  by  enjoying 
it,  too,  in  the  fairest,  perhaps,  and  least  worldly,  of 
all  of  the  cities  of  earth. 

No  poem  of  Clough' s  is  about  Oxford  itself  or  any 
part  of  it,  or  any  particular  Oxford  persons.  Our 
assurance  that  in  love  for  Oxford  he  was  second  to 


8o  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

no  man  rests,  perhaps  not  altogether  securely,  on 
the  authority  of  his  friends,  particularly  F.  T.  Pal- 
grave.  It  seems  natural  to  suppose  that  for  him 
as  for  Arnold  the  walks  they  took  together  through 
Bagley  Wood,  over  Cumner  Hill,  down  the  Isis,  had 
high  emotional  significance,  both  at  the  time  that 
they  were  taken  and  in  recollection.  But  if  this 
*  is  true,  the  emotion  took  different  directions  in  the 
two  poets.  Arnold's  great  Oxford  poems,  though 
they  both  profess  to  have  personal  subjects,  are 
mainly  taken  up  with  the  charm  of  the  Oxford 
countryside.  Names  of  places,  and  points  unnamed, 
are  dwelt  on  with  apparently  the  truest  fondness  : 

*'  Runs  it  not  here,  the  track  by  Childsworth  Farm, 
Past  the  high  wood  to  where  the  elm-tree  crowns 
The  hill  behind  whose  ridge  the  sunset  flames  ? 
The  single  elm,  that  looks  on  Ilsley  Downs, 
The  Vale,  the  three  lone  wears,  the  youthful  Thames  ?  " 

But  Clough,  when  he  writes  about  fictitious  Oxford 
people,  in  The  Bothie,  removes  them  to  a  vaca- 
tion haunt,  a  region  possessing  no  suggestion  of  the 
Oxfordshire  landscape.  It  is  the  people  that  inter- 
est Clough.  And  it  is  one  sort  of  personal  relation 
that  he  sings  in  two  of  his  best  known  lyrics,  and 
two  that  are  closest  to  the  conditions  of  Oxford 
life. 

These  poems,  "  Qua  Cursum  Ventus  "  and  "  Sic 
Itur,  "  deal  with  friendship,  and  with  the  tragic 
element  in  friendship,  the  necessity  of  parting. 
They  view  friendship  with  youthful  solemnity,  and 
yet  quite    honestly    and    naturally.       They    show 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  8i 

very  well  how  far  Clough  stands  on  this  side  of 
Romanticism  ;  for  friendship  is  a  classical,  a  con- 
ventional, or  anything  else  before  a  romantic 
subject,  the  value  of  friendship  to  a  man  being  that 
it  lessens,  not  enhances,  his  sense  of  the  mystery, 
the  foreignness,  of  the  world  about  him.  They  call 
to  mind,  too,  how  particularly  poignant  the  sense 
of  the  fleetingness  of  earthly  associations,  always 
present  in  the  atmosphere  of  a  university,  must  have 
been  in  the  Oxford  of  these  days,  with  the  additional 
causes  it  had  for  the  breaking  of  close  ties  in  the 
quarrels  brought  on  by  the  Movement.  And  they 
are  further  a  reminder  of  the  disappointment,  pecu- 
liar to  Clough,  of  seeing  break  into  pieces  and  fly 
off  into  all  directions,  none  perhaps  so  far  aside  as 
that  which  he  himself  took,  the  stout  Rugby  phalanx 
which  his  high  youthful  fancy  had  seen  advancing, 
ever  united  and  ever  victorious,  to  the  conquest 
of  a  world  of  sin.  It  is  not  therefore  as  a  personal 
loss  that  he  deplores  parting,  but  as  a  most  pain- 
ful evidence  of  the  difficulties  of  co-opera- 
tion, the  impossibihty  of  keeping  the  good  in 
the  world  all  united  for  the  contest  with  evil. 
There  is  something  of  the  tone  of  Lycidas  in  the 
poems. 

Less  unromantic,  it  is  agreeable  to  notice,  are  two 
early  poems  on  Love.  The  romance  in  these, 
however,  is  not  at  all  a  matter  of  yearnings  and 
despairs,  of  moonlight,  nor  of  eyebrows.  It  is  a 
matter  of  careful  speculation — a  single  idea,  in  fact, 


82  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

subtly  developed  :  the  idea  that  Love  is  the  one 
mysterious  power  which  is  to  be  obeyed  even  before 
Duty  and  before  Reason. 

"  Men  and  maidens,  see  you  mind  it ; 
Show  of  love,  where'er  you    find  it, 
Look  if  duty  lurk  behind  it ! 
Duty-fancies,  urging  on 
Whither  love  had  never  gone  !  " 

It  is  a  lyric  not  without  charm,  this  awkwardly 
named  "  Love,  Not  Duty,"  and  it  is  interesting 
as  a  consistent  first  utterance  of  a  poet  who  wrote 
much  and  thoughtfully  about  love  and  marriage, 
from  a  point  of  view  high  and  sane  and  considerably 
in  advance  of  his  time.  "  Poet  of  Doubt "  Clough 
was  named  in  the  years,  just  after  his  death,  when 
Darwin's  books  were  causing  men  to  classify  every- 
thing under  the  head  of  Doubt  or  the  head  of  Belief. 
Yet  of  his  four  main  works,  three,  The  Bothie, 
Amours  de  Voyage,  and  Mari  Magno,  are  con- 
cerned mainly  with  love ;  and  in  the  fourth, 
Dipsychus,  it  appears  to  be  principally  because 
the  poem  is  incomplete  that  love  plays  a  secondary 
part.  In  these  early  lyrics  he  is  a  poet  of  love  who 
is  not  as  yet  making  professed  use  of  any  experience 
in  the  field  that  he  may  himself  have  accumulated. 
Love  exacts  meditation  from  him  as  a  beautiful 
vision  on  the  one  hand,  and  as  a  serious  responsi- 
bihty  on  the  other  ;  but  there  is  nothing  to  indicate 
a  connection  between  this  meditation  and  any  parti- 


AS  FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  83 

cular  case.  Everything  Clough  has  to  say  about 
love  is  perfectly  general : 

"  A  glory  on  the  vision  lay ; 
A  light  of  more  than  mortal  day 
About  it  played,  upon  it  rested ; 
It  did  not,  faltering  and  weak, 
Beg  Reason  on  its  side  to  speak  : 
Itself  was  Reason,  or,  if  not. 
Such  substitute  as  is,  I  wot. 
Of  seraph-kind  the  loftier  lot." 

To  all  of  which  it  might  be  urged  that,  whether 
begged  or  not,  this  is  certainly  Reason  speaking  on 
the  side  of  Love. 

But  reason  was  speaking  to  Clough  in  these  days 
much  less  frequently  on  the  side  of  Love  than  on 
the  side  of  Duty.  There  was  no  conflict  between 
the  two  :  Love  continued,  apparently,  to  present 
no  problems  demanding  solution,  whereas  Duty 
kept  in  the  forefront  all  the  time  the  problem. 
What  to  do  with  a  life.  Clough  seems  to  have  been 
so  greatly  interested  in  the  problem  that  he  was 
reluctant  to  solve  it  and  so  have  it  out  of  his  way. 
Yet  he  is  continually  expressing  his  confidence  that 
Duty  is  the  true  guide,  and  that  he  has  committed 
himself  to  following  her  guidance  implicitly.  It  is 
this  which  he  is  saying  in  a  noteworthy  poem  of 
1847,  "  The  Questioning  Spirit  "  ;  and  rather  more 
explicitly  and  forcibly  in  a  set  of  hexameters,  done, 
perhaps,  a  little  later  : 


84  ARTHUR  HUGH  GLOUGH 

"  Go  from  the  east  to  the  west,  as  the  sun  and  the  stars  direct 

thee; 
Go  with  the  girdle  of  man,  go  and  encompass  the  earth  : 
Not  for  the  gain  of  the  gold  ;  for  the  getting,  the  hoarding,  the 

having. 
But  go  for  the  joy  of  the  deed  ;  but  for  the  Duty  to  do. 
Go  with  the  spiritual  life,  the  higher  voHtion  and  action. 
With  the  great  girdle  of  God,  go  and  encompass  the  earth." 

Here  seems  to  be  a  moderately  specific  and  a 
quite  firmly  established  idea  of  what  duty  is.  In 
another  poem,  written,  it  appears,  nearer  the  time 
when  the  great  decision  of  his  life,  to  leave  Oxford, 
was  being  made,  there  begins  the  analysis  of  duty 
which  was  to  play  so  important  a  part  in  Dipsychus 
and  other  later  works.  This  poem,  printed  under 
the  name  "  Duty,  "  is  the  bitterest  piece  of  irony 
that  Clough  ever  wrote.  It  is  perhaps  the  only 
thing  he  ever  wrote  that  reveals  unrestrained  ill- 
temper  and  a  spirit  of  rebellion.  It  contemns  the 
current  idea  of  duty  : 

"  Duty — 'tis  to  take  on  trust 
What  things  are  good  and  right  and  just 
And  whether  indeed  they  be  or  not, 
Try  not,  test  not,  feel  not,  see  not." 

Back  to  his  own  higher  notion  of  Duty  the  poet 

rushes  in  the  final  verses  : 

"  Duty ! 
Yea,  by  duty's  prime  condition 
Pure  nonentity  of  duty  !  " 

This  is  rough  versifying,  even  for  Clough  ;  but  it 
has  a  very  satisfying  freedom  from  the  air  of  quies- 
cence that  mars  much  of  Clough' s  work  on  themes  in 


AS   FELLOW  OF  ORIEL  85 

the  treatment  of  which  quiescence  is  a  highly  unde- 
sirable quality. 

It  is  disappointing  to  find  in  the  poems  of  Clough's 
years  of  teaching  at  Oxford  so  little  improvement 
over  his  undergraduate  poems  in  respect  to  form — 
or  perhaps  it  should  be  said  rather,  so  little  appear- 
ance of  an  increase  of  concern  about  form,  since  the 
considerable  improvement  that  there  is  seems  to 
proceed  directly  from  a  firmer  grasp  on  ideas  and 
a  heightened  emotional  intensity,  and  not  from  any 
attention  paid  to  expression  itself.  Imitation  is  a 
fault  with  most  young  poets,  but  Clough  was  not 
imitative  enough.  After  his  first  boyish  imitations 
of  Wordsworth,  he  struck  out  for  himself  quite  too 
negligently  of  teachers  who  might  have  given  him 
much  that  he  needed.  This  carelessness  of  the  art 
of  writing  was  a  part  of  his  sleepless  suspicion  of 
everything  that  was  not  the  truth  itself,  truth  about 
God  or  about  Man.  But  it  was  a  manifestation 
also  of  a  lack  in  Clough's  nature  of  verve  and  style, 
of  a  sense  for  grace  and  melody.  It  was  a  serious 
failing,  and  yet  Clough,  we  may  suppose,  might 
have  overcome  it  more  successfully  than  he  did,  if 
he  had  put  himself  to  school  to  the  great  poets  of  the 
preceding  generation.  But  this  there  is  every  reason 
to  believe  it  did  not  occur  to  him  to  do.  It  is  as  if 
he  trusted  all  too  far  to  Milton's  dictum  that  he  who 
would  "  write  well  hereafter  in  laudable  things  ought 
himself  to  be  a  true  poem." 

Refraining  from  imitation,  if  it  stunted  Clough's 


86  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

craftsmanship  on  the  one  hand,  helped  to  secure 
to  him,  on  the  other,  the  genuine  originaUty  that 
proceeds  from  ahnost  perfect  simplicity  and  unso» 
phistication.  It  has  already  been  remarked  of  two 
of  his  poems  that  they  show  a  long  advance  from 
the  days  of  the  romantic  poets.  He  never  hunts 
out  subjects  like  theirs  to  write  about,  but  always 
writes  out  of  the  thoughts  and  feelings  of  his  own 
daily  life,  the  daily  life  of  a  University  man  of 
the  second  quarter  of  the  century.  To  such  a  con- 
ception of  poetry  the  need  for  the  poet  to  make  his 
life  a  true  poem  is  a  corollary.  There  were  other 
reasons  for  Clough's  determination  to  leave  Oxford ; 
but  one  reason  was  persuasion  that  his  cloistered 
life  was  too  narrow  to  be  truly  poetic. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  BOTHIE    OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH 

LEAVING  Oxford  was  the  most  nearly  dramatic 
thing  Clough  ever  did.  He  gave  up  his 
tutorship  in  Oriel  in  April  1848,  and  his  fellowship  in 
October,  with  no  promise  and  no  very  fair  prospect 
of  a  position  elsewhere.  If  Browning  had  added 
Clough  to  his  dramatic  portraits  this  is  the  episode 
in  his  Ufe  with  which  he  would  needs  have  been 
content.  To  Clough  himself,  reflecting  over  the  act 
long  and  heavily,  both  before  and  after,  it  seemed 
enormously  dramatic,  however  much  he  may  have 
felt  the  necessity  of  making  his  departure  modestly 
and  quietly  and  of  disparaging  the  boldness  of  it  to 
himself  as  to  others.  At  least  one  of  his  admirers  is 
equally  inclined  to  ascribe  epochal  significance  to  the 
move.  "  When  Clough  left  Oxford,"  writes  Charles 
EUot  Norton,  "  he  had  conquered  his  world.  .  .  . 
Whatever  might  become  of  him,  whatever  he  might 
become,  his  life  was  a  success  such  as  scarcely  one 
man  in  a  generation  achieves."  It  was  one  of  the 
chief  disabilities  of  Clough  for  practical  life  that  he 
shared  this  extravagant  estimate  of  the  almost 
wholly    negative    virtue    of    intellectual    honesty. 

87 


88  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

What  it  came  to  in  conduct  was  that  he  insisted  on 
seeing  himself  as  differing  widely  from  groups  of 
men  with  whom  he  was  really  in  almost  perfect 
agreement.  The  few  points  of  difference  he  heeded 
and  magnified  because  they  were  the  proofs  of  his 
individuality.  Above  all  things  he  thought  it  right, 
and  he  wanted,  to  become  himself  ;  he  was  coming 
to  see  that  the  way  to  be  himself  was  to  get  out  of 
himself  ;  and  the  way  to  get  out  of  himself  was  to 
get  out  of  Oxford. 

To  remain  seemed  the  practical  thing  no  less 
certainly  than  to  go  was  the  ideal  thing.  A  few 
shy  inquiries  about  work  in  the  outside  world  had 
been  fruitless  ;  and  to  work  in  order  to  live  was  a 
necessity  with  Clough  as  well  as  a  principle.  He  had 
not  only  to  support  himself,  but  must  carry  out  an 
agreement  he  had  entered  into  after  his  father's 
death.  He  had  promised  to  pay  a  member  of  his 
family  an  annuity  of  £ioo  in  return  for  the  final 
reversion  of  a  larger  sum.  He  had  the  fixed,  and 
for  that  reason  if  no  other,  valid  opinion  that  he 
could  not  write  rapidly,  nor  spontaneously  ;  and 
his  conscience  limited  very  severely  the  number  of 
reviews  to  which  he  would  permit  himself  to  contri- 
bute. He  speaks  in  one  of  his  letters  of  the  time  of 
having  determined  to  abandon  verse  for  the  writing 
of  essays,  presumably  for  economic  reasons.  But 
he  seems  to  have  felt  in  the  main  that  his  one  chance 
of  making  a  living  lay  in  teaching.  There  were  very 
few  teaching  positions  outside  of  the  University 


THE   BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICII    89 

that  were  at  all  well  paid  or  at  all  congenial,  so  few 
as  to  make  Clough's  decision  to  go  forth  into  the 
world  appear  not  merely  bold  but  rash.  It  re- 
quired immeasurably  more  courage  than  a  similar 
decision  would  require  to-day,  in  England,  or  especi- 
ally in  America. 

An  action  of  such  consequence  rested,  of  course, 
for  a  man  like  Clough,  on  a  vast  and  complicated 
array  of  considerations.  The  thing  that  precipitated 
the  problem  was  that  remaining  at  Oxford  meant 
not  merely  subscription  to  the  Thirty-nine  Articles 
but  the  taking  of  Holy  Orders.  A  Charter  provision 
concerning  the  original  Fellowships  of  the  Oriel 
foundation  was  that  nine  of  them  should  be  held  by 
students  of  theology  and  three  by  students  of 
common  or  canon  law.  Modern  interpretation  had 
converted  this  into  a  rule  that  Fellows  of  the  first 
class  should  take  Holy  Orders,  and  those  of  the 
second,  degrees  in  law  or  medicine.  Clough's  was 
a  theological  Fellowship,  and  he  had  held  it  for 
six  years.  The  contingency  of  taking  Orders  he 
was  presumably  compelled  to  look  upon  as  immi- 
nent. And  he  was  not  merely  out  of  agreement 
with  the  particular  principles  that  taking  Orders 
would  bind  him  to  support  ;  he  was  continually 
confessing  to  his  correspondents  an  utter  weari- 
ness of  the  whole  world  of  theological  talk  and 
ecclesiastical  gossip. 

With  this  difficulty  was  connected  another,  for 
which    again    responsibility    lay    chiefly    with    the 


90  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

fourteenth  century  founders  of  the  college.  When 
the  reluctant  Fellow  had  taken  Orders  it  yet  re- 
mained for  him  to  choose  between  academic  and 
domestic  life.  It  was  practically  impossible  for 
him  to  have  both.  In  these  years  before  successive 
Parliamentary  Commissions  had  as  yet  laid  rough 
hands  on  the  University  Statutes,  it  was  only  Heads 
of  Colleges  and  a  very  few  other  Senior  Members 
that  were  permitted  to  have  wives.  If  Clough 
wanted  to  marry — and  The  Bothie  says  nothing 
if  not  that  he  did  want  to  marry — his  choice  was 
between  breaking  away  from  Oxford  altogether  on 
the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  not  only  taking  Orders 
but  accepting  a  benefice  and  actually  conducting 
church  services. 

It  must  also  have  counted  for  something  with 
Clough  that  he  was  almost  as  far  out  of  sympathy 
with  the  politics  of  the  University  as  with  its  re- 
ligion— which  is  to  say  that  his  divergence  was 
slight,  by  ordinary  standards,  but  that  he  himself 
considered  it  to  be  great  and  decisive.  What 
set  him  to  thinking  politically  was  the  Irish  famine 
of  1847.  An  association  had  been  formed  to  en- 
courage economy  among  the  under-graduates — more, 
apparently,  as  a  way  of  exhibiting  sympathy  with 
the  Irish  than  as  an  attempt  at  actually  helping 
to  keep  them  alive.  One  of  Clough' s  longer  prose 
works  is  a  pamphlet  discussing  objections  to  this 
movement.  The  work  is  typical  of  its  author 
in  that  it  is  impossible  to  classify  it  either  as  for  or 


THE   BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLTCH    91 

as  against  the  association  it  is  written  about.  Its 
message  is  the  characteristically  subjective  and 
impractical  one,  Do  not  be  wholly  indifferent  to 
this  matter.  But  in  the  course  of  delivering  it 
Clough  voices  considerable  dissatisfaction,  not  with 
the  forms  of  his  country's  government,  but  with  the 
spirit  animating  them.  A  governing  class  is  essen- 
tial and  a  plutocracy  is  essential,  but  the  rich  and 
powerful  are  to  refrain  from  manifesting  their  wealth 
and  their  power  in  certain  ways  especially  likely 
to  offend  the  lower  classes, —  and  squeamish  lookers- 
on  from  the  Universities — with  the  spectacle  of 
distressing  contrasts  in  respect  of  happiness  and 
prosperity.  So  far  as  Clough  had  a  political  motive 
for  leaving  Oxford,  it  seems  fair  to  describe  that 
motive  as  a  desire  to  gather  up  two  huge  and  all 
but  exactly  equal  masses  of  evidence  and  re^ 
flection,  one  favourable  and  the  other  unfavourable 
to  Democracy,  rather  than  to  throw  his  own  weight 
into  the  fight  on  either  side. 

A  strong  impulse  to  change  came  to  Clough  through 
his  personal  relations.  His  family,  indeed,  and 
most  of  his  friends  advised  him  to  stay  where  he 
was.  But  in  the  year  before,  Matthew  Arnold  had 
given  up  his  Fellowship  at  Oriel  to  become  secretary 
to  Lord  Lansdowne,  thereby  at  once  setting  Clough 
an  example  of  restlessness  and  making  the  college 
a  less  pleasant  place  of  residence  for  him.  The 
two  were  very  close  together  at  this  time.  In  a 
letter  to  his  sister  of  March  1848,  Arnold  says  of  a 


92  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

temptation  to  political  writing  which  he  had 
overcome,  "  So  I  desisted,  and  have  only  poured 
forth  a  little  to  Clough,  we  two  agreeing  like 
two  lambs  in  a  world  of  wolves."  It  was  at  this 
time,  too,  that  Clough  met  Emerson.  He  writes 
to  him  first  in  November  1847,  to  ask  him  to 
visit  him  at  Oxford.  He  is  emboldened  to  do  so, 
he  states,  by  the  fact  that  his  sister  has  recently 
met  Emerson  in  Liverpool.  Emerson  came  to  Oxford 
toward  the  end  of  the  winter  term,  and  spent  three 
days.  The  two  were  much  together  in  the  following 
spring.  They  were  in  Paris  at  the  same  time,  and 
dined  together  daily  for  a  month,  as  Clough  records 
in  a  letter  to  Thomas  Arnold.  Later  they  met  fre- 
quently in  London,  and  before  he  sailed  for  America 
in  the  middle  of  July,  Emerson  was  with  Clough 
at  his  home  in  Liverpool.  "  He  gives  you  an  impres- 
sion," Clough  writes,  "of  perfect  intellectual  cul- 
tivation." It  is  easy  to  suppose  that  Clough  per- 
mitted or  persuaded  the  older  man  to  talk  much  to 
him  of  self-reliance  and  freedom  from  convention- 
ality. Self-reliance  Clough  had  been  able  to  main- 
tain at  Oxford  fairly  well,  but  to  live  untrammelled 
by  conventionality  in  that  most  conventional  place 
in  all  the  world  was  a  vastly  more  difficult  if  not  an 
utterly  hopeless  undertaking. 

To  be  thoroughly  of  its  decade  this  examination 
of  motives  would  probably  have  begun  as  well  as 
ended  with  an  inquiry  into  the  facts  of  the  physical 
life  of  the  subject.     Some  plausible  explanations 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH      93 

would  doubtless  be  afforded  by  such  an  inquiry. 
At  least  two  physical  effects  are  obvious — a  rest- 
less discontent  proceeding  from  prolonged  celibacy, 
and  a  weariness  of  the  business  of  living  resulting 
from  the  tubercular  tendency  to  which  Clough  was 
finally  to  succumb.  He  really  needed  rest  and 
change.  This  is  proved,  perhaps,  by  the  gusto  with 
which,  conscientious  man  that  he  was,  he  idled 
away  the  pleasant  months  of  his  year  of  freedom. 

Clough  went  to  Paris  on  the  ist  of  May  1848, 
and  remained  there  five  weeks.  Much  was  going 
on  in  Paris.  These  were  the  days  of  struggle  between 
bourgeoisie  and  populace  for  the  control  of  the  newly 
formed  republic.  Clough  looked  on  with  delight 
at  the  emeute  of  the  15th  May,  and  at  the  fete 
of  the  following  Sunday.  His  letters  show  him 
sympathetic  with  the  proletariat,  though  not  so 
much  in  the  manner  of  a  genuine  enthusiast  for 
democracy  as  in  that  of  the  spectator  at  a  game  who 
chooses  a  side  in  order  to  sharpen  his  interest.  "  I 
am  a  bad  hand  at  lionizing,"  he  writes.  "  I  do  little 
else  than  potter  about  under  the  Tuileries  chest- 
nuts, pour  savo24rer  la  republique."  This  indeed 
was  on  the  day  before  the  rioting,  and  he  admits  to 
a  considerable  depression  during  the  week  that 
followed  it.  But  there  is  a  decided  air  of  detach- 
ment about  Clough' s  comments  on  the  revolution — 
an  absence  of  any  indication  that  his  feelings  had 
been  really  stirred  by  it.  What  did  arouse  his 
enthusiasm  was  the  strong  sense  of  life  itself,  moving 


94  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to  whatever  ends  and  by  whatever  rules,  which  he 
got  from  the  stir  of  the  boulevards. 

Returning  from  France,  he  divided  his  summer 
between  London  and  Liverpool.  During  the  month 
of  September  he  wrote  his  first  long  poem  —  The 
Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich.  He  wrote  it  at  his 
home  in  Liverpool — in  a  small  room  of  an  upper 
story,  his  sister  says,  of  their  small  house  in  Vine 
Street,  near  Edge  Hill.  It  was  published  by  Mac- 
pherson,  an  Oxford  bookseller,  in  November  1848, 
and  reprinted  in  America,  at  Cambridge,  in  the 
following  year. 

At  Oxford  the  poem  was  received  with  consider- 
able interest,  and  on  the  whole  with  favour,  but 
with  a  good  deal  of  surprise.  The  Tractarian  Move- 
ment had  left  Oxford  in  the  habit  of  assuming  that 
religion  must  be  at  the  bottom  of  any  sudden 
eccentricity  in  the  actions  of  any  of  her  sons,  and 
that  she  would  be  presented  duly  with  a  full  and 
solemn  explanation  of  the  eccentricity.  This  pre- 
sumption was  especially  strong  in  the  case  of  a  man 
who  bore  the  marks  of  inward  struggle  in  his  talk 
and  appearance  as  obviously  as  Clough  bore  them. 
Hearing  of  a  new  book  by  him,  Oxford  went  forth 
to  buy  a  set  of  theological  reasons  for  giving  up  a 
Fellowship,  and  was  confused  to  find  herself  reading 
instead  a  humorous  narrative  poem  so  far  from 
saintly  that  some  of  its  lines  struck  her  as  decidedly 
risquL  Oxford  really  liked  the  book,  however, 
whether  on  account  of  its  local  allusions,  as  Clough 


THE  BOf  HIE  OF  tOBEk-NA-VUOLlCH     95 

himself  suggests  in  a  letter,  or  because  it  appealed 
to  a  strong  love  of  simple,  open-air  living  that  was 
still  there,  although  University  poets  and  preachers 
of  the  past  generation  had  not  allowed  it  expression. 
Outside  of  Oxford  The  Bothie  created  no  great 
stir.  It  was  reviewed  scornfully  by  the  Spectator, 
and  effusively  by  William  Rossetti,  in  the  first 
number  of  the  Germ.  Much  the  most  interesting 
and  important  criticism  of  it  was  contributed  by 
Charles  Kingsley  to  the  January  1849  number  of 
Fr user's.  Kingsley 's  first  reason  for  liking  the  poem 
is  its  freedom  from  the  tone  and  accent  of  Tractarian- 
ism.  It  is  not  "  a  sickly  bantling  of  the  Lyra 
Apostolica  school."  He  is  enthusiastic  about  its 
health  and  vigour  and  manliness.  "  There  runs 
through  the  poem  a  general  honest}^  a  reverence  for 
facts  and  nature — a  belief  that  if  things  are  here, 
they  are  here  by  God's  will  or  the  devil's,  to  be  faced 
manfully,  and  not  to  be  blinked  cowardly  ;  in  short, 
a  true  faith  in  God — which  makes  Mr.  Clough's 
poem,  light  as  may  seem  the  subject  and  the  style, 
and  coming  just  now  as  it  does  from  noble  old  Oxford, 
anything  but  unimportant,  because  they  indicate 
a  more  genial  and  manly,  and  therefore  a  more 
poetic  and  more  godly  spirit,  than  any  verses  which 
have  come  out  of  Oxford  for  a  long  time  past." 
With  this  genuinely  classical  spirit,  Kingsley  finds, 
the  hexameter  form  is  in  admirable  correspondence. 
If  the  ridiculous  is  admitted  alongside  of  the  sub- 
lime it  is  in  wise  deference  to  the  real  nature  of  a 


96  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

world  in  which  the  two  go  always  hand  in  hand. 
Subject  matter  was  novel,  and  it  was  right  that 
treatment  should  be  novel.  In  short,  Kingsley 
said  all  that  he  could  to  encourage  the  sale  of  the 
little  book.  His  influence  at  this  time,  when  his 
first  novel  had  not  yet  appeared,  was  not,  of  course, 
nearly  so  great  as  it  was  to  become. 

Clough  was  greatly  encouraged  by  the  praise 
his  poem  received,  the  more  so  as  it  did  not  commit 
him  to  any  serious  pretensions  as  a  poet,  and  as  he 
had  written  it  very  offhandedly  and  hastily.  He 
writes  to  Emerson  in  the  winter  that  although  he 
started  writing  in  September,  he  had  no  thought 
of  this  or  any  other  poem  in  July.  Yet  the  experi- 
ence out  of  which  Clough  developed  his  story  was 
an  accumulation  not  of  this  but  of  the  preceding 
summer.  In  the  long  vacation  of  1847  he  had  gone 
to  the  Highlands  as  tutor  of  a  reading  party  of 
undergraduates.  Among  these,  Thomas  Arnold  re- 
cords, were  Warde  Hunt,  later  a  Member  of  Parlia- 
ment, and  Charles  Lloyd,  the  son  of  a  bishop  of 
Oxford.  Arnold  himself,  with  John  Campbell 
Shairp,  Theodore  Walrond,  and  one  or  two  others, 
were  making  a  walking  tour  through  Scotland,  and 
turned  aside  to  visit  Clough  and  his  party  at  Drum- 
nadrochit,  on  the  north  shore  of  Lake  Ness,  where 
they  had  settled  down  for  several  weeks  in  a  large 
farm-house.  On  the  way  thither,  as  both  Arnold 
and  Shairp  have  told,  they  two  left  the  others  of 
their  party  and  walked  north  along  the  west  side  of 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH      97 

Loch  Ericht.  All  the  land  here  belonged  to  the 
deer  forest  of  Lord  Abercorn,  and  there  was  no 
human  dwelling  on  all  the  shore  except  a  forester's 
hut,  nanried  on  the  maps  "  Toper-na-Fuosich." 
This  is  the  name  Clough  used  at  first  for  the  title 
of  his  poem.  The  two  walkers  were  hospitably 
received  there  and  spent  the  night,  and  told  Clough 
of  their  pleasant  experience  when  they  met  him  at 
Drumnadrochit.  When  his  reading  party  broke 
up  he  and  a  friend  began  a  long  ramble  through 
the  Western  Highlands  by  taking  this  walk  along 
Loch  Ericht  and  stopping  at  the  forester's  hut. 
Some  of  the  incidents  of  The  Bothie,  according  to 
Shairp,  happened  to  them  while  they  were  stopping 
at  an  inn  on  Loch  Rannoch  ;  and  in  Glenfinnan, 
at  the  head  of  Loch  Shiel,  they  ran  into  the  ball 
which  Clough  utilized — a  celebration  given  by 
MacDonald  of  Glen  Aladale  in  honour  of  the  officers 
of  some  naval  vessels  then  lying  in  a  near-by  port. 
The  high  spirits  of  The  Bothie  are  genuine  enough 
to  show,  without  the  testimony  of  Clough' s  friends, 
how  completely  he  enjoyed  these  things. 

In  order  to  fit  a  story  to  his  scenes,  his  characters, 
and  his  reflections,  Clough  centres  attention  on  a 
hero  whom  he  calls  Philip  Hewson,  a  member  of 
the  reading  party,  a  radical  and  a  poet,  and  of  course 
a  lover.  Hewson  is  partly  Thomas  Arnold,  it  has 
been  conjectured,  but  what  is  obviously  truer  is 
that  he,  as  well  as  the  tutor,  "  the  wise  man  Adam," 
is  Clough.     After  the  ball  and  the  ensuing  discus- 


98  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

sions  about  ladies  of  high  and  low  degree  have  dis- 
rupted the  scholarly  contentment  of  the  reading 
party,  Philip  goes  off  by  himself,  to  wander  and  to 
think.  What  he  is  thinking  about  is"  mating — in 
connection  first  with  pretty  farmer's  daughter  Katie, 
then  with  Lady  Maria,  and  last  and  resultfully 
with  heroine  Elspie,  sensible  daughter  of  the  smith 
at  Tober-na-Vuolich.  Much  of  the  poem,  and  of 
the  best  of  it,  is  made  up  of  the  gay  talk  of  the 
reading  party,  and  is  not  very  closely  knit  up  with 
the  story.  Yet,  perhaps  because  the  whole  piece 
is  so  informal,  no  absence  of  unity  distresses  the 
reader ;  the  idea  that  life  must  be  lived  soberly 
but  can  be  lived  happily  at  the  same  time,  runs 
through  all  the  talking  and  acting  and,  large  and 
obvious  as  it  sounds,  seems  to  provide  a  perfectly 
adequate  coherence. 

The  treatment  of  Oxford  in  the  poem  is,  in  a 
manner,  indirect.  Oxford  is  picked  up  from  the 
valley  of  the  Isis  and  set  down  in  the  Calvinistic 
and  democratic  Highlands.  The  contrast  is  a  strong 
one,  and  adds  to  the  variety  and  charm  of  the  poem, 
though  Clough  minimizes  it  on  the  whole,  his  purpose 
being  to  discuss  his  problem  as  universal  and  not  as 
particular.  It  is  never  a  contrast  between  one  side 
as  good  and  the  other  as  bad.  In  the  end,  it  is  true, 
Philip  marries  Elspie  and  takes  her  off  to  New  Zea- 
land— but,  first,  he  goes  back  to  the  University  and 
takes  his  degree.  The  University  is  the  best  possible 
place  to  train  for  life — it  is  emphatically  not  life 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH      99 

itself.  It  is  interesting  to  notice  that  all  Clough's 
undergraduate  characters  are  very  different  from 
what  he  had  been  as  an  undergraduate  and  from  his 
ideals  of  that  time.  They  all  possess  this  sense 
which  he  had  lacked,  of  real  life  as  quite  another 
kind  of  thing  from  Oxford.  They  are,  indeed,  almost 
that  "  rougher  element "  whose  very  existence 
Clough  had  deprecated  in  Rugby  if  not  in  Balliol 
days  ;  yet  here  he  is  at  last,  finding  just  in  these 
health  and  sense  and  truth.  Oxford  is  a  place  for 
young  barbarians  to  play,  Clough  agrees — to  work 
also,  but  much  in  the  same  play  spirit.  Youth  had 
been  right,  after  all,  and  the  aged  wisdom  wrong 
which  had  too  much  impressed  itself  on  the  years 
when  he  ought  to  have  been  young. 

Indeed  the  most  interesting  thing  The  Bothie 
shows  about  Clough  is  that  he  has  entered  at  last 
upon  his  own  belated  boyhood.  "  As  a  boy,"  he 
says  in  one  of  his  letters,  "  I  had  less  of  boyish  enjoy- 
ment of  any  kind  whatever,  either  at  home  or  at 
school,  than  nine-tenths  of  boys ;  certainly,  even 
as  a  man  I  think  I  have  earned  myself  some  title 
to  live  for  some  little  interval,  I  do  not  say  in  enjoy- 
ment, but  without  immediate  devotion  to  particular 
objects  :  on  matters,  as  it  were,  of  business."  He 
realizes,  that  is,  that  he  is  setting  back  the  clock 
of  his  spirits,  and  is  doing  it,  in  part,  deliberately. 
Yet  the  change  bears  every  appearance  of  spon- 
taneity, too.  There  is  nothing  disagreeably  kitten- 
ish about  The  Bothie.    He  has  not  had  to  force  this 


100  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

new  interest  of  his  in  visible  and  tangible  persons 
and  things.  It  is  a  yet  keener  interest  than  the  old 
one  in  invisibles.  It  cannot  be  said  to  have  held 
steady  throughout  the  remaining  years  of  his  Hfe, 
but  it  never  failed  him  long,  it  made  him  definitely  a 
happy  man,  and  in  its  first  flowering  it  enabled  him  to 
paint,  in  The  Bothie,  one  of  the  most  attractive  pic- 
tures ever  made  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  ideal  of  youth. 

It  was  remarked  in  connection  with  Clough's 
earlier  religious  poems  that  when  at  last  he  reached 
a  sort  of  resting  place  in  the  course  of  his  arduous 
quest  for  this  kind  of  truth,  he  found  his  hard- won 
position  rather  barren  and  unsatisfactory  as  a 
basis  for  continued  contemplation,  but  inspiriting 
in  so  far  as  it  led  to  action  and  to  concern  with  con- 
crete things.  Merely  to  think  that  action  was  the 
thing  was  not,  of  course,  satisfactory — or  Clough's 
life  would  have  been  a  singularly  satisfying  experi- 
ence. It  was  needful  for  him  to  know  that  he  was 
absolutely  acting.  Tae  exhilaration  of  The  Bothie 
is  best  explicable  by  the  circumstance  that  just  at 
the  time  he  was  writing  it  the  feeling  that  he  was 
so  actiDg  ruled  its  author's  breast.  Michaelmas 
term  was  about  to  begin,  and  he  for  the  first  time 
since  his  tenth  year  was  not  going  back  to  school, 
but  was  out  in  the  world,  once  and  for  all,  to 
work  and  to  live.  Later,  the  new  course  was  to 
discover  obstacles  as  serious  as  those  of  the  old, 
and  to  induce  the  despair  and  the  cynicism  that 
break  out  in  Dipsychus.    But  for  the  present  all 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    loi 

is  well.  The  world  is  brave  and  good,  and  from  top 
to  bottom  there  is  nothing  in  it  that  cannot  be 
looked  at  straight  and  steadily — nothing  that  so 
looked  at  will  not  increase  the  sum  of  courage  and 
good  cheer. 

It  has  unfortunately  a  paradoxical  sound  to  say 
of  a  book  that  it  is  at  once  thus  optimistic,  lighted 
up  with  the  glamour  of  youth,  and  also  singularly 
realistic.  This  may  be  said  of  The  Bothie.  It  is 
high-spirited  and  not  unromantic,  but  it  bears  at 
the  same  time  every  mark  of  an  almost  complete 
fidelity  to  Clough's  experience.  This  closeness  to 
actuality  has  brought  upon  it  the  charge  that  it  is 
pedestrian  and  obvious.  We  celebrate  the  virtues 
of  simplicity,  correctness  of  observation,  and  omis- 
sion of  the  irrelevant,  and  for  the  rare  combination 
of  them,  when  we  find  it,  pedestrian  and  obvious 
are  likely  to  be  our  words.  The  mystery  Hewson 
saw  in  Elspie  was  not  enough  to  add  to  beauty 
the  proportion  of  strangeness  which  English  readers 
required  ;  and  it  has  occurred  to  Americans  that  the 
greater  popularity  the  poem  has  had  with  them  may 
possibly  rest  on  their  inferior  acquaintance  with 
the  ways  of  Highland  readirg  parties.  Clough's 
persistent  dread  of  the  factitious  was  the  conscious 
and  volitional  side  of  the  freedom  from  the  instinct 
to  dream  which,  strangely  for  a  poet,  was  natural 
to  him.  It  prevented  him  from  giving  to  the  material 
any  more  than  to  the  form  of  his  work  very 
much  of    what  could    seriously    be    called    poetic 


102  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

elevation.  But  truth  ages  well,  even  when  it  is 
bald ;  and  the  homely  persons  and  real  feelings  of 
The  Bothie  have  already  outlasted  many  more 
decorative  heroes  and  heroines  of  Victorian  song, 
and  much  sentiment  that  was  only  almost  true. 
In  spite  of  its  hexameters  it  is  not  difficult  to  take 
The  Bothie  as  a  novel,  and  a  decidedly  realistic 
novel.  As  a  photograph  of  mid-century  Britons 
it  is  more  truthful,  not  only  than  other  poems,  but 
also  than  the  great  professedly  realistic  novels  of 
its  day.  There  is  less  imagination  in  it,  for  better 
and  for  worse,  and  less  illusion,  than  in  David  Cop- 
perfield  or  The  Newcomes — ^less  poetry,  in  a  sense. 
The  most  important  thing  in  life  to  Dickens  is 
sympathy  ;  to  Thackeray,  it  is  honour  ;  but  to 
Clough,  it  is  work.  Clough  held  his  readers  down 
to  the  inexorable  reality  they  were  so  glad  to  escape 
through  the  humour  of  Dickens,  or  the  sentiment 
of  Thackeray,  through  long  introspection  with 
Tennyson,  or  through  spasmodic  bursts  of  bravery 
with  Browning  :  he  held  them  down  to  the  central 
truth  that  man  must  work  to  live,  and  always  under 
circumstances  faUing  short,  in  some  respect  or  other, 
of  ideal  dignity,  and  holding  out,  except  in  rare 
cases,  no  prospect  of  any  adequate  reward  for  the 
individual. 

"  Let  us  get  on  as  we  can,  and  do  the  thing  we  are  fit  for ; 
Every  one  for  himself,  and  the  common  success  for  us  all,  and 
Thankful,  if  not  for  our  own,  why  then  for  the  triumph  of 

others." 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    103 

And  the  second  concern  of  life,  love,  is  best  looked 
at  in  close  association  with  work,  not  kept  apart 
from  its  contamination.  For  Clough,  and  his  Philip 
Hewson,  what  stirs  the  sentiment  of  chivalry  in 
man  is  not  the  irresponsibility  of  a  Dora,  not  the 
saintliness  of  an  Agnes,  not  the  fine  ladyship  and 
the  charity  of  an  Ethel  Newcome,  but  the  sight  of 

"some  delicate  woman 
Serving  him,  toiling — for  him,  and  the  world  ;  some  tenderest 

girl,  not 
Over-weighted,  expectant,  of  him,  is  it  ?  " 

Men  are  to  learn,  and  to  teach  the  other  sex,  that 

women   are   most   beautiful   when   they   are   most 

useful. 

"  Bending  with  blue  cotton  gown  skirted  up  over  striped  linsey- 
woolsey. 
Milking  the  kine  in  the  field,  like  Rachel,  watering  cattle, 
Rachel,  when  at  the  well  the  predestined  welcomed  and  kissed  her. 
Or,  with  pail  upon  head,  like  Dora  beloved  of  Alexis, 
Comely,  with  well-poised  pail   over  neck  arching  soft  to  the 

shoulders, 
Comely  in  gracefullest  act,  one  arm  upUfted  to  stay  it. 
Home  from  the  river  or  pump  moving  stately  and  calm  to  the 

laundry ; 
Ay,  doing  household  work,  which  some  one,  after  all,  must  do. 
Needful,  graceful  therefore,  as  washing,  cooking,  and  scouring. 
Or,  if  you  please,  with  the  fork  in  the  garden  uprooting  potatoes." 

Nothing  in  The  Bothie  is  more  attractive  than  the 
mingled  good  sense  and  fineness  of  its  attitude 
toward  women.  The  discussion  of  the  beauty  of 
work  for  women  is  an  echo  presumably  of  Clough's 
long  talks  with  his  sister  about  what  she  was  to 
do  in  the  world.     But  since  in  the  poem  the  tasks 


104     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

Clough  talks  about  for  women  are  not  the  new,  but 
the  old  tasks,  the  poem  was  not  regarded  at  the 
time,  nor  can  it  be  now,  as  a  document  of  any  im- 
portance in  the  woman  movement.     His  thinking 
on  the  subject  bore  fruit  rather  through  personal 
influence  than  through  anything  written.     His  sis- 
ter, whose  unusual  character  developed  rather  slowly, 
became  in  the  decade  after  his  death  one  of  the 
persons  most  actively  interested  in  the  education 
of  women.     A   considerable   inheritance  from  the 
Perfect  family  gave  her  means  and  leisure  to  de- 
vote to  the  cause.     With  the  vSidg wicks  and  others, 
she  was  a  moving  spirit  in    the    establishment    of 
a  hall  of  residence  for  women  at  Cambridge,  and 
in   securing   their   admission    to    lectures    and  ex- 
aminations.     When   Newnham  Hall  was  founded, 
she  was  made  its  Principal,  and  she   retained  the 
position  after  the  hall  became  a  college — in  all,  for 
twenty  years.       She   herself    considered   that   the 
facts   and   the   ideas   which  she  worked  with  and 
which  she  passed  on  to  many  others,  had  come  to 
her  from  her    brother.     A    similar    connection    of 
Clough's    with  the  enfranchisement  of  women  may 
be  found  in  the  position   he   held  as   the    trusted 
friend  and  adviser  of  Miss  Florence  Nightingale. 

The  difficulties  of  the  morality  of  work  as  a  mes- 
sage for  poetry  are,  first  that  it  is  practical,  and, 
second,  that  it  is  unescapable.  It  is  capable  of 
immediate  and  perfectly  objective  application.  It 
almost   commands   the   reader   to   drop  his   book. 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    105 

It  is  the  principle  of  life  which  everybody  knows, 
and  to  evade  the  too  pressing  consciousness  of  which 
is  for  many  readers  the  only  reason  for  ever  reading 
poetry  at  all.  It  calls  for  just  the  cheerful  and  steady 
and  unassuming  efforts  that  the  reader  is  tired  of 
putting  forth,  and  calls  for  them  by  old  names,  with 
no  promises  held  out  to  the  instincts  for  novelty  and 
drama.  Nor  does  it  offer  the  rest  from  strife,  the 
sense  of  superiority,  the  indifference  to  fate,  which 
Samuel  Butler  awards  to  the  man  who  finds  his 
level  in  life  and  travels  ahead  on  it.  The  hero  of 
The  Way  of  All  Flesh  drops  away  from  his  old 
associates  and  thinks  he  has  found  the  real  truth 
about  life  in  no  longer  trying  to  live  up  to  their 
expectations  of  him,  or  to  enthusiasms  and  ideals 
of  his  own,  and  in  being  content  with  easily  attain- 
able satisfactions.  This  is  to  take  not  merely  an 
objective  but  a  hand-to-mouth  view  of  life,  and 
considering  the  long  record  of  human  aspiration,  a 
very  inadequate  view.  The  hero  of  The  Bothie 
confines  himself  to  attainable  ideals,  but  these  remain 
ideals  none  the  less  ;  he  is  deUberately  committing 
himself,  therefore,  to  the  wearing  come-and-go 
of  hope  and  disappointment  which  everybody  sees 
life  to  be  who  is  not  putting  some  forced  interpre- 
tation on  it  for  the  sake  of  his  comfort.  Clough's 
lust  for  sincerity  did  him  several  kinds  of  disservice, 
but  one  service  it  rendered  was  to  enable  him  to 
describe  a  quite  extraordinarily  honest  and  balanced 
way  of  facing  life,  and  so  to  make  his  work  truly 


io6     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

realistic,  from  the  moral  point  of  view  as  well  as 
in  respect  to  the  portrayal  of  manners. 

A  simple  way  of  proclaiming  possession  of  the 
truth  which  Clough  does  not  employ  is  the  denun- 
ciation of  shams.  The  tutor  Adam  does  indeed 
persuade  Hewson  to  distinguish  between  the  Good 
and  the  Attractive,  but  they  both  see  that  these 
do  not  exist  apart,  but  always  in  some  degree  of 
commingling.  It  is  only  the  absolute  ideahst  who 
can  afford  to  denounce  shams  very  heavily.  Car- 
lyle  could  do  it,  because  even  when  he  reached  the 
inevitable  conclusion  that  one  thing  in  actual 
life  is  just  as  much  a  sham  as  another,  he  had  his 
transcendental  world  left.  He  had  the  dreaming 
faculty,  for  which  past  and  future  are  alive  equally 
with  the  present  in  a  vast  romantic  system  created 
by  the  imagination.  But  Clough  was  no  dreamer 
of  dreams.  Life  interested  him  not  as  a  thing  to 
marvel  at,  but  as  a  thing  to  control,  or  else  to  en- 
dure. It  was  not  his  practice  to  maintain  an  ima- 
ginary world  wherein  he  could  operate  as  toys  of 
his  mind  notions  of  justice  and  symmetry  which  he 
found  unreahzed  in  the  world  of  experience.  Hence, 
whenever  he  destroyed  anything  for  himself  by 
calling  it  sham,  his  universe  suffered  a  definite  loss, 
which  he  had  no  means  of  making  up.  He  could 
separate  the  good  from  what  was  attractive  and 
from  what  was  neither  ;  but  he  could  not  carry  his 
classification  to  the  point  of  marking  off  a  class  of 
gigmen  or  of  barbarians  as  finally  wrongheaded 


THE  BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    107 

and  negligible.  He  had  to  keep  on  hunting  for  good 
everywhere,  and  when  he  could  not  find  it  the  only 
thing  for  him  to  do  was  to  change  his  specifications 
of  good.  The  hold  of  Carlyle,  and  of  the  German 
and  the  Platonic  traditions  is  strong  on  him ;  so 
that  when  he  does  his  first  thinking  in  this  new 
way,  which  is  his  own  way,  he  covers  it  up  with 
a  show  of  half-seriousness,  and  apologizes  for  it 
further  with  the  sub- title,  **  A  Long- Vacation 
Pastoral."  » 

This  lightness  of  touch  in  The  Bothie  seems  to 
depend  more  than  on  anything  else  on  the  use  of 
the  hexameter  form.  In  one  of  his  letters  to  Emer- 
son, Clough  asks  him  to  "  convey  to  Mr.  Longfellow 
the  fact  that  it  was  a  reading  of  his  Evangeline 
aloud  to  my  mother  and  sister,  which,  coming  after 
a  reperusal  of  the  Iliad,  occasioned  this  outbreak 
of  hexameters."  At  this  time  and  for  more  than 
ten  years  later  there  was  much  talk  in  England  on 
the  profound  question  whether  there  realty  was, 
or  might  be,  any  such  thing  as  an  English  Hexa- 
meter. Clough' s  public  had  been  educated,  largely, 
through  the  scansion  and  the  imitation  of  Virgil 
and  Homer,  and  it  found  the  easiest  and  most  self- 
satisfying  sort  of  attention  to  pay  to  the  new  poem 
in  the  perception  of  damning  differences  between  The 
Bothie  and  the  Mneid.  These  comparisons  were 
not  always  wholly  unfavourable,  as  witness  the  most 
widely  read  of  them,  Arnold's  incidental  disposal 
of    Clough' s   supposed   classical   ambitions   in   his 


io8  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

lecture  On  Translating  Homer :  "  Mr.  Clough's 
hexameters  are  excessively,  needlessly  rough  ;  still, 
owing  to  the  native  rapidity  of  this  measure,  and 
to  the  directness  of  style  which  so  well  allies  itself 
with  it,  his  composition  produces  a  sense  in  the  reader 
which  Homer's  composition  also  produces, — the  sense 
of  having,  within  short  limits  of  time,  a  large  portion 
of  human  life  presented  to  him,  instead  of  a  small 
portion."  But  generally  it  was  held  against  Clough, 
either  that  he  should  have  attempted  hexameters 
at  all,  or  else  that  he  should  have  afforded  more 
evidence  of  an  unflagging  effort  to  deviate  in  no 
single  respect  from  the  classical  models. 

At  a  time  when  so  much  of  the  verse  we  read 
professes  nothing  less  than  complete  freedom,  the 
seriousness  with  which  we  take  this  sort  of  criticism 
is  lightened.  A  majority  of  ears  are  not  greatly 
offended,  are  even  somewhat  agreeably  titillated, 
by  Clough's  gambolHng  measures.  He  seems  at 
home  in  the  form  he  has  chosen,  and  able  to  speak 
his  mind  freely  in  it,  both  in  gay  and  in  sober  mood. 
Besides,  there  is  special  fitness  in  a  classical  measure 
as  a  medium  for  a  man  who  has  spent  his  life  reading 
and  teaching  the  classics,  as  also  in  his  taking  with 
this  medium,  since  it  is  "  shop  "  to  him,  great  and 
frivolous  liberties.  A  mind  so  academic  as  Clough's 
was  certain  to  betray  itself  sooner  or  later  in  any 
case,  and  to  be  mock-academic  from  the  start  was 
a  good  way  to  obviate  self-criticism  on  this  score  in 
the  act  of  composition,  as  well  as  to  forestall  some  of 


THE  BOTHIE   OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    109 

the  scoffs  of  irreverent  readers.  And,  further,  there 
was  opportunity  to  take  pains  now  and  then  with  a 
few  h"nes  which  completed  would  strike  the  academic 
ear  as  a  pleasing  echo — such  lines  as: 

"  Under  the  rocky  wall  that  hedges  the  bed  of  the  streamlet. 
Rounded  a  craggy  point,  and  saw  on  a  sudden  before  them 
Slabs  of  rock,  and  a  tiny  beach,  and  perfection  of  water." 

Clough  was  to  write  much  better  hexameters  in  his 
next  long  poem,  but  the  carelessness  of  those  in  The 
Bothie  is  little  likely  to  appear  fatal  in  the  eyes  of 
readers  who  have  any  capability  of  liking  the  poem 
on  other  counts. 

In  the  one  largest  section,  at  least,  of  the  world 
that  reads  English  poets,  they  are  read  pretty  syste- 
matically in  the  schools  and  colleges.  The  particu- 
lar poets  read  are,  of  course,  prescribed  by  author- 
ity. The  poets  to  whom  pupils  are  thus  introduced 
are  the  poets,  according  to  one  theory,  whom  they 
read  in  later  life,  and  according  to  another  theory 
the  poets  whom  for  as  long  as  they  live  after  school- 
days they  rigorously  eschew.  The  task  of  selection 
is  compUcated  for  the  prescribing  school  heads  by 
the  persistence  of  both  these  theories  and  the  diffi- 
culty of  reconciling  them.  It  would  be  yet  more 
difficult  if  it  were  approached  with  a  definite 
notion  of  a  specific  end  to  be  attained  by  having 
the  young  read  poetry.  Real  selection  would  then 
be  necessary.  As  it  is,  the  criteria  which  determine 
the  amount  of  time  to  be  given  to  a  poet  are  likely 


no  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to  be,  first,  whether  he  was  bom  in  America  or 
not,  and  second,  Greatness.  Youth  is  put  through 
a  good  deal  of  Whittier  on  a  judgment  of  the  first 
class,  and  through  a  good  deal  of  Spenser  on  a  judg- 
ment of  the  second  class.  But  suppose  so  great  a 
change  might  be  effected  as  to  secure  the  prescription 
first  of  all  of  poetry  which  teaches  the  most  widely 
and  immediately  workable,  and  the  most  unillusory 
and  unsentimental  and  unmagniloquent  counsels 
for  the  living  of  life  ;  in  such  a  regime  what  work 
would  stand  higher  on  the  reading  list  than  The 
Bothie?  It  talks  about  things  youth  is  pondering 
over.  It  is  eminently  sensible  ;  and  it  is  gay,  and 
unlikely  to  induce  green  sickness. 

Meredith's  own  poem  will  not  teach  half  so  under- 
standably as  The  Bothie  its  best  of  lessons,  to 

"  Toss  the  heart  up  with  the  lark." 

Athletics  and  fraternities  teach  it — it  is  enforced  in 
all  of  the  good  Anglo-Saxon  school  life  outside  the 
classroom.  Studies  are  prejudiced  in  comparison 
partly  because  they  so  frequently  teach  the  narrower 
and  timider  philosophies  of  middle  age,  and  of  more 
youthful  views  of  life  almost  none  but  those  of  abnor- 
mal yopng  men — Shelley,  Keats,  Coleridge — men 
we  no  more  want  our  youngers  to  resemble  than 
they  themselves  are  desirous  of  resembling  them. 
Parts  of  The  Bothie,  the  talk  of  Pugin  and  of  Thucy- 
dides,  for  instance,  may  be  a  little  hard  to  follow- 
nowadays,  a  trifle  slow,  but  as  a  whole  The  Bothie 


THE   BOTHIE  OF  TOBER-NA-VUOLICH    iii 

could  surely  be  made  a  useful  link  between  the 
liveliness  of  the  football-field  and  the  dancing-room 
on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  the  remoteness — 
at  times,  possibly,  even  dullness — of  the  study  of 
literature. 


/^ 


CHAPTER  VI 
AMOURS  DE  VOYAGE 

IN  the  autumn  after  he  gave  up  his  fellowship 
Clough  returned  to  Oxford  for  a  stay  of  several 
weeks.  Professor  Conington  tells  of  finding  him 
in  some  small  and  cheap  lodgings  in  Holywell,  living 
without  fire  in  cold  weather.  The  rooms  were  near 
Parson's  Pleasure,  the  University  bathing  place,  and 
Clough's  soul  seems  to  have  demanded  for  its  good 
a  November  series  of  daily  plunges.  Later  in  the 
winter  he  spent  most  of  his  time  in  Liverpool  with 
his  mother  and  sisters.  He  did  not  remain  long 
without  the  certainty  of  employment  for  the  next 
year.  He  was  offered  and  accepted  the  Headship 
of  University  Hall,  an  institution  which  furnished 
tuition  and  living  accommodations  to  students  attend- 
ing lectures  in  University  College,  London.  This  was 
the  non-sectarian  half  of  London  University.  It 
was  understood  to  be  rather  glad  to  get  hold  of 
Clough  ;  and  Clough  on  the  whole  rejoiced  in  his 
appointment,  though  he  confesses  in  a  letter  written 
just  after  receiving  it  that  he  has  his  misgivings.  He 
had   landed,  at  any  rate,  in  one   of   a  very  few 

112 


AMOURS   DE  VOYAGE  113 

places  congenial  to  his  way  of  being  quite  religious 
without  either  affirming  or  denying  much  ol  any- 
thing. He  writes  to  the  reverend  authority  with 
whom  his  negotiations  had  been  made  that  he  has 
attended  various  sorts  of  service  with  complete 
tolerance,  that  he  prefers  Westminster  Abbey  to  a 
Scotch  chapel,  and  that  his  dislike  of  the  Thirty-nine 
Articles  is  firm.  He  will  strongly  approve  of  prayers, 
but  will  not  superintend  them,  nor  even  promise 
faithful  attendance.  He  will  not  proselytize,  be- 
cause he  has  nothing  to  proselytize  to  ;  but  he  \\dll 
not  keep  absolute  silence.  His  employers  found 
nothing  to  object  to  in  this  statement  of  principles. 
In  April  of  1849  he  went  to  Rome.  There,  as  in 
Paris  the  year  before,  he  was  present  at  an  interesting 
time.  The  new  Pope,  after  attempting  a  com- 
promise with  the  revolutionary  spirit,  had  fled  the 
city  in  disguise,  and  Mazzini  with  his  associated 
triumvirs  was  in  command.  The  Republica  Romana 
had  endured  for  two  months.  Garibaldi  was  at  hand 
to  defend  it  against  the  French  force  of  invasion 
under  General  Oudinot.  The  eyes  of  Europe  were 
on  the  eternal  city  ;  and  they  remained  on  it  until, 
at  the  end  of  July,  the  reinforced  French  army  was 
finally  successful  in  its  singular  purpose  of  over- 
throwing a  sister  republic  and  restoring  the  absolute 
rule  of  the  Pope.  Throughout  these  exciting  months 
Clough  remained  in  Rome,  imprisoned  in  it  for  most 
of  the  time  by  the  vicissitudes  of  war.  His  letters 
show  him  unalarmed  at  the  situation,  alive  to  the 


114  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

hurry  of  events  and  the  personalities  of  the  actors 
great  and  small,  not  very  clear,  excusably  enough,  as 
to  the  significance  of  the  turmoil,  and  not  much 
inclined  to  proceed  to  conclusions  about  liberty  and 
democracy  and  popular  wrongs.  He  meets  Mazzini, 
and  finds  him  practical  and  even  shifty.  After  the 
victories  in  May  he  is  enthusiastic  enough  to  speak 
of  the  "  wonderful  courage  and  glorious  generosity  " 
that  the  republic  has  shown  under  Mazzini's  inspira- 
tion. Later  it  is  not  hard  for  him  to  see  a  general 
apathy  in  the  Romans  ;  and  when  he  leaves  Italy  it  is 
with  the  exclamation  :  "  Farewell,  politics,  utterly  ! 
What  can  I  do  ?  Study  is  much  more  to  the  purpose." 
The  holiday  concluded  in  this  serious  and  rather 
pessimistic  frame  of  mind  was  from  the  first,  appar- 
ently, a  more  sober  and  reflective  and  a  less  joyous 
affair  than  the  earlier  vacation  journeys  to  the  High- 
lands and  to  Paris.  Clough  is  an  unfriendly  critic 
in  nearly  all  that  he  writes  about  Rome  and  the 
Romans.  He  lets  himself  be  seen  as  the  standard 
English  traveller,  with  the  one  inclusive  grievance 
that  all  things  everywhere  aie  not  modelled  with 
sufficient  accuracy  upon  the  authoritative  EngUsh 
usage.  Possibly  the  heat,  and  attendant  circum- 
stances, of  a  Roman  summer  affected  him  physically. 
He  says  nothing  of  his  health  in  his  letters  ;  but  he 
was  never  at  any  time  given  to  complaining.  At 
any  rate,  the  long  poem  which  he  wrote  during  this 
vacation  and  immediately  after  it  is  quite  devoid 
of  the  exuberance  of  The  Bothie.    The  freedom  and 


AMOURS  DE  VOYAGE  115 

the  carelessness  of  writing  of  The  Bothie  were  real  and 
not  pretended  ;  but  Amours  de  Voyage  shows  in 
every  line  that  its  author  was  willing  to  spend  time 
on  polishing,  if  not  that  he  was  adept  at  polishing. 
And  greater  still  is  the  difference  in  emotional  tone, 
a  difference  sufficiently  indicated  on  the  title  pages  : 
the  Amours  de  Voyage  is  so  far  from  announcing  it- 
self as  a  "  Vacation  Pastoral  "  that  it  starts  off  with 
a  number  of  most  dispiriting  quotations,  one  of  them 
Shakespeare's : 

*  "  Oh,  you  are  sick  of  self-love,  Malvolio, 

And  taste  with  a  distempered  appetite  !  " 

and  another  the  still  more  disquieting  Une  from  a 
French  novel: 

"  II  doutait  de  tout,  meme  de  Taraour." 

The  Clough  of  the  Amours,  whether  because  of  the 
weather,  or  his  health,  or  an  astonishing  surmise 
concerning  the  public  taste,  or  merely  the  attain- 
ment of  a  stage  in  the  orderly  process  of  his  life's 
thinking,  is  very  much  in  doubt,  not  merely  con- 
cerning love  itself,  but  even  concerning  virtue  itself. 
This  pervading  doubt  extended  to  Clough' s  estima- 
tion of  the  value  of  his  poem  after  he  had  written  it. 
He  had  rushed  into  print  with  The  Bothie,  and  in  the 
early  part  of  the  year  1849  had  published  his  short 
poems  in  the  volume  called  Ambarvalia,  for  which 
he  and  his  school  friend,  the  Reverend  Thomas 
Burbidge,  shared  responsibility.  But  he  kept  the 
Amours  de  Voyage  by  him  for  nine  years.  He  sold 
it  at  last  to  James  Russell  Lowell  for  the  Atlantic 


ii6  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

Monthly,  where  it  ran  thi'ough  the  numbers  from  Feb- 
ruary to  May  of  1858.  It  was  reprinted  in  1862,  the 
year  after  Clough's  death.  The  money  he  received 
from  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  "  a  handsome  sum,"  he 
writes  to  a  friend,  was  the  only  money  Clough  ever 
got  out  of  his  poetry. 

A  letter  which  Clough  wrote  to  Palgrave  in  the 
winter  after  his  return  from  Italy  shows  that  his  sus- 
picions of  his  new  work  were  of  its  manner  rather 
than  its  matter.  He  has  sent  Palgrave  the  manuscript 
to  read  and  has  asked  for  criticisms,  and  is  replying 
to  a  letter  containing  some  which  he  complains  of  as 
"  not  half  trenchant  enough."  And  they  are  not 
quite  to  the  point.  "  What  I  want  assurance  of," 
he  writes,  "is  in  the  way  of  execution  rather  than 
conception.  If  I  were  only  half  as  sure  of  the 
bearableness  of  the  former  as  I  am  of  the  propriety 
of  the  latter,  I  would  publish  at  once."  It  would 
be  interesting  to  know  certainly  just  what  Clough 
feared  was  the  matter  with  his  lines.  In  the  opinion 
of  most,  or  all,  of  his  critics,  what  ails  them  is  that 
though  unobjectionable  they  are  plain.  But  plain 
is  precisely  what  Clough  was  convinced  verse  ought 
to  be.  It  is  in  this  poem  that  the  line  occurs  which 
is  more  frequently  quoted  than  any  other  of  his : 

"...  the  horrible  pleasure  of  pleasing  inferior  people." 

To  remain  unpolluted  by  that  pleasure  seems  to 
have  been  his  first  principle  of  composition.  He 
was  afraid,  we  may  suppose,  that  Palgrave  would 


AMOURS  DE   VOYAGE  117 

point  out  to  him  passages  proffering  inferior  varieties 
of  pleasure — appealing  by  tinkling  melody  to  the 
kind  of  people  who  read  Tom  Moore,  or  by  over- 
luxuriant  imagery  to  the  less  discriminating  of  the 
admirers  of  Tennyson,  or  by  clatter  and  dash  to 
friends  of  the  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome.  But  unfortu- 
nately not  Palgrave  nor  any  one  could  possibly  bring 
these  charges.  The  hexameters  of  the  Amours  are 
never  irregular  and  sHpshod  as  are  some  of  those 
of  The  Bothie,  and  they  are  not  garrulous,  nor  gushing, 
nor  sing-song.  There  are,  in  fact,  very  many  bad 
things  which  they  are  not,  and  the  sole  difficulty 
remains  that  there  are  so  few  good  things  which 
they  are. 

However  far  Clough  may  have  been  from  seeing 
where  his  faults  of  style  lay,  he  was  right  in  turning 
his  attention  toward  them  at  last,  and  in  permitting 
himself  meanwhile  some  confidence  in  the  soundness 
of  his  views  of  life.  It  was  too  late  for  any  degree  of 
concern  about  form  to  enable  him  to  write  one  of  the 
superlatively  beautiful  poems  of  the  century ;  but 
his  new  painstaking  established  Amours  de  Voyage  as 
much  the  most  finished,  most  nearly  perfect,  of  his 
own  works.  His  style  at  any  rate  did  not  stand  in 
his  way.  It  did  not  prevent  him  from  expressing 
with  clearness  and  brevity  a  full  and  complicated 
and  a  very  knowing  set  of  ideas.  Since  there  is  not 
much  passion  in  the  poem,  no  vivid  action,  and  very 
little  natural  description,  it  had  little  occasion  to  rise 
to  any  impressive  height.     The  lines  that  a  reader 


ii8     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

retains  in  mind  are  likely  to  owe  their  persistence 

to  an  adequacy  of  candour  rather  than  to  any  more 

brilliant  quality.    They  are  such  lines  as  these  : 

"  If  there  is  any  one  thing  in  the  world  to  preclude  all  kindness, 
It  is  the  need  of  it — it  is  this  sad,  self-defeating  dependence." 

It  is  much  truer  of  the  Amours  than  of  The  Bothie 
that  whether  it  is  a  poem  or  not  it  is  certainly  a  novel. 
It  is  a  careful  study  of  manners  and  motives,  and  it 
is  not  simple,  sensuous,  and  impassioned.  But  to 
any  who  would  proceed  from  this  to  a  conclusion 
that  the  form  of  the  work  was  a  mistake,  the  fact 
that  it  does  somehow  attain  artistic  integrity  ought 
to  be  clear  enough  to  provide  a  measure  of  restraint. 
It  does  not  crystallize  any  part  of  the  beauty  of  life 
very  clearly  ;  but  it  gives  a  strong  and  an  integral 
impression  of  beauty  as  always  just  out  of  reach. 
And  it  is  an  irritating  work  ;  but  it  is  full  of  honest 
thinking. 

I  As  in  his  earlier  poem,  Clough  enlarges  but  little 
on  his  own  experience  in  making  his  plot.  His 
hero  is  in  most  respects  in  just  the  situation  that  he 
himself  is  in  at  the  time  of  writing  :  in  Rome,  doing 
the  sights  and  looking  on  at  the  efforts  of  the  citizens 
to  keep  out  the  French  besiegers.  But  Claude,  the 
hero,  has  a  third  interest  in  life — falling  in  love ;  and 
it  is  here  tha  this  creator  calls  on  his  imagination. 
There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  Clough  had  any  senti- 
mental experiences  in  Rome.  In  the  letter  to  Pal- 
grave,  already  referred  to,  he  as  much  as  says 
that  he  had  none.     "  Gott  and  Teufel !  my  friend,'* 


AMOURS  DE   VOYAGE  119 

he  exclaims,  "  you  don't  suppose  all  that  comes  from 
myself !  I  assure  you  it  is  extremely  not  so."  Since 
the  other  two  of  the  three  elements  of  his  content 
do  obviously  come  from  himself,  it  must  be  the  love 
story  that  he  is  talking  about.  It  is  a  quite  simple 
love  story,  besides — not  at  all  out  of  the  range  even 
of  Clough's  very  cautious  imagination.  It  provides, 
of  course,  the  central  thread,  with  the  story  of  the  siege 
and  the  comments  on  antiquities  furnishing  an  apt 
and  undistracting  series  of  digressions,  pretty  closely 
woven  into  the  general  scheme.  The  poem  is  made 
up  of  letters,  most  of  them  written  by  Claude  to  his 
confidant ;  and  if  he  had  talked  of  only  one  subject 
in  these  letters  he  would  be  open  to  praise  for  single- 
ness of  purpose,  and  his  love  story  would  have  been 
something  very  different  from  this  record  of  uncer- 
tainty and  hesitation. 

Clough's  tourist's  observations  on  Rome  are  partly 
sesthetic  and  partly  religious,  and  he  is  very  much 
more  at  home  in  the  latter  kind  of  talk  than  in  the 
former.  He  seems  to  mean  his  hero  to  be  taken  as 
something  of  a  connoisseur,  as  a  man  whose  weariness 
of  the  world  is  largely  explained  by  his  having  attended 
too  much  to  the  mere  beauty  of  it.  But  the  remarks 
he  attributes  to  his  Claude — that  the  Coliseum  is 
merely  large,  St.  Peter's  full  of  sculptures,  and  Rome 
itself  "  rubbishy  " — are  better  understandable  as  the 
comments  of  a  man  with  a  little  knowledge  of  jargon, 
and  with  good  intentions,  but  not  necessarily  with 
any  sense  at  all  of  architectural  and  sculptural  beauty. 


120  ARTHUR   HUGH   CLOUGH 

He  boasts,  this  Claude,  of  hating  Childe  Harold  ;  but 
his  words  offer  no  justification,  except  of  the  coldest 
nil  admirari  soit  for  his  feeling  superior  to  it.  His 
distastes,  in  short,  are  so  pettish  as  to  cause  him  to 
fall  short  of  the  minimum  of  dignity  desirable  in  a 
hero  of  a  poem  of  this  sort  and  length.  His  religi- 
ous dislikes  are  more  vigorously  expressed  than  his 
artistic  dislikes  and  seem  somewhat  honester.  But 
the  note  of  passion  here  is  a  little  bewildering.  It 
is  unnatural  to  Clough,  and  unnatural  to  the  tone 
of  this  work  to  write  : 

"  these  vile,  tyrannous  Spaniards, 
These  are  here  still  — how  long,  O  ye  heavens,  in  the  country  of 

Dante  ? 
These,  that  fanaticised  Europe,  which  now  can  forget  them." 

Other  reflections  on  Church  history  are  more  tolerant 
and  more  attractive.  But  on  the  whole  the  reader 
is  glad  when  the  activities  of  the  siege  close  the 
museum  to  Claude,  and  turn  his  attention  away 
from  the  churches  and  toward  the  crowds  in  the 
streets. 

One  of  the  things  Arnold  says  about  Clough  in  the 
eulogy  of  him  at  the  end  of  the  lectures  On  Translat- 
ing Homer  is  that  he  had  a  single-hearted  care  for 
his  object  of  study.  Arnold  certainly  meant  the 
phrase  as  a  compliment ;  but  it  can  be  taken  as 
expressive  of  the  chief  inferiority  of  Clough  to  himself. 
Clough  was  indeed  zealous  enough  about  seeing  his 
object  as  it  in  itself  really  was  to  satisfy  Arnold  or 
any  one.  But  he  stopped  with  the  seeing.  He  did 
not,  as  Arnold  did,  have  two  things  in  his  mind  and 


AMOURS   DE   VOYAGE  121 

heart,  one  of  them  his  object  of  study  and  the  other 
the  collective  intelligence,  such  as  it  was,  of  his 
countrymen  ;  he  was  not  continually  searching  his 
object  of  study  for  ways  in  which  he  might  raise 
the  level  of  that  intelligence.  He  was  inclined  to 
be  too  little  aware  of  things  as  becoming,  and  too 
neglectful  of  his  opportunities  for  assisting  in  the 
general  process.  He  had  something  of  Bacon's 
faith,  that  things  if  once  rightly  seen  could  be  counted 
on  to  produce  new  things,  new  truths ;  he  did  not 
see  the  need  of  investigating  with  a  specific,  practical 
purpose,  nor  the  need  of  forming  hypotheses  and 
doing  his  best  by  them.  All  this  can  be  seen  in  the 
way  he  treats  the  stand  of  the  Roman  Republicans. 
Arnold  would  have  felt  just  as  superior  to  them,  at 
most  points,  as  Clough  felt.  But  he  would  have 
been  sure  to  find  at  least  one  lucid  and  striking  lesson 
which  the  English  could  learn  from  them.  Clough 
is  content  to  set  down  what  he  sees  and  what  he 
feels,  and  perhaps  one  or  two  more  old  truths  which 
he  considers  to  have  been  disproved.  And  he  lets 
it  go  at  that.  On  public  affairs  he  is  an  impression- 
ist ;  and  his  impressions  always  lack  novelty,  and 
sometimes  lack  vividness. 

The  best  thing  about  Clough' s  handling  of  the 
siege  is  the  perfect  candour  with  which  he  describes 
the  feehngs  it  moved  in  him  ;  and  a  similar  merit 
is  the  photographic  accuracy  of  his  pictures  of  what 
went  on  in  the  streets.  Claude  is  much  less  vain 
than  the  usual  hero  of  this  type  and  of  this  century. 


122  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

He  does  not  try  to  make  virtues,  nor  on  the  other 
hand  grandiose  sins,  of  his  emotional  peculiarities. 
He  is  now  enthusiastic,  and  now  apathetic,  about 
the  Roman  defence,  and  he  does  not  try  to  make 
out  any  sort  of  consistency  for  his  moods.  He  admits 
that  he  himself  feels  no  call  to  fight  for  liberty,  and 
does  not,  in  a  more  modem  fashion,  arrogate  his 
reluctance  as  a  point  of  superiority  : 

"  Sweet  it  may  be  and  decorous,  perhaps,  for  the  country  to  die ; 
but 
On  the  whole,  we  conclude  the  Romans  won't  do  it,  and  I 
shan't." 

Very  observant,  and  frightfully  cynical  for  the  middle 

of  the  century,  though  sincere  enough  in  present 

light,  are  these  lines: 

"  Victory  !  Victory  !  Victory  ! — Ah,  but  it  is,  believe  me. 
Easier,  easier  far,  to  intone  the  chant  of  the  martyr 
Than  to  indite  any  paean  of  any  victory.     Death  may 
Sometimes  be  noble  ;  but  life,  at  the  best,  will  appear  an 

illusion. 
While  the  great  pain  is  upon  us,  it  is  great ;  when  it  is  over. 
Why,  it  is  over.    The  smoke  of  the  sacrifice  rises  to  heaven, 
Of  a  sweet  savour,  no  doubt,  to  Somebody ;  but  on  the  altar, 
Lo,  there  is  nothing  remaining  but  ashes  and  dirt  and  ill  odour." 

Clough  turns  his  historical  background  to  good 
account :  it  provides  vivid  activity  to  contrast  with 
Claude's  languor,  and  it  gives  opportunities  for  Claude 
to  bring  himself  out  in  denials  of  the  utility  of  action, 
and  refusals  to  sympathize  with  it. 

The  love  story  is  of  a  type  that  is  common  enough  in 
life,  but  exceedingly  rare  in  fiction.  The  public  likes 
its  love  to  run  a  smooth  course.     It  also  likes  it  now 


AMOURS  DE  VOYAGE  123 

and  then  to  run  over  the  edge  of  a  precipice  or  into 
the  mouth  of  a  fiery  furnace.  It  does  not  hke  it  to 
run  up  and  down  sand  dunes  until  it  finally  loses  itself 
in  the  waste.  The  honest  Clough  was  convinced  that 
the  course  of  love  was  frequently  of  this  last  sort. 
He  was  looking,  we  may  suppose,  into  his  own  heart, 
and  finding  there  reason  to  fear  that  any  love  he 
himself  might  contract  would  be  likely  to  take  this 
desolate  middle  way  between  tragedy  and  bliss.  It 
may  have  been  part  of  his  calculation  that,  inferior 
people  having  always  preferred  one  extreme  or  the 
other,  superior  persons  might  be  attracted  by  the 
mean.  And  for  that  calculation  a  good  deal  could 
be  said.  And  much  can  be  said  for  Clough's  story. 
It  moves  disappointingly  to  a  disappointing  end ;  but 
it  could  not  possibly  end  in  another  way,  for  the 
thesis  of  it  is  that  love  and  lovers  are  often  dis- 
appointing. Having  once  undertaken  an  ungrateful 
task,  Clough  at  least  executes  it  faithfully. 

The  hero  is  an  idler,  and  more  fashionable  and 
more  epicurean  Clough — on  the  whole,  considerably 
different.  The  exigencies  of  living  in  a  besieged  city 
throw  him  into  some  unusually  familiar  contacts, 
especially  with  a  prosperous  family  of  English  busi- 
ness people,  the  Trevellyns.  He  finds  himself 
attracted  particularly  to  one  of  the  daughters,  Mary. 
The  attraction  is  strong,  and  grows  stronger.  But 
like  everything  else  that  concerns  his  own  being 
intimately,  it  receives  from  him  a  vast  expenditure 
of  thought.     It  becomes  translated  into  ideas,  and 


124  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

this  form  of  it  persists  alongside  of  the  original 
emotional  impulse.  And  as  idea  it  is  startlingly 
weaker  than  as  impulse.  Claude's  nature  compels 
him  to  attend  to  it  in  its  intellectual  form.  He  has  to 
reflect  for  the  thousandth  and  ten  thousandth  times 
that  Mary  is  less  polished  than  many  another  girl,  that 
her  beauty  though  unquestioned  is  not  at  all  unusual, 
■  that  her  family  is  the  family  of  a  country  banker, 
and  that  she  probably  does  not  like  him.  WTiile  he 
is  reflecting,  the  Trevellyns  leave  Rome,  Mary  re- 
luctantly and  hopefully.  Claude's  mind  being  thus 
made  up  for  him  by  deprivation,  he  starts  in  pursuit. 
But  a  series  of  delays  and  failures  to  meet  produces 
a  reversion  to  indecisiveness.  And  there  the  story 
ends. 

The  letter  method  of  writing  the  story  was  sug- 
gested perhaps  by  Werther.  It  has  the  advantage 
of  lending  itself  to  the  most  uninterrupted  flow  of 
introspection.  And  Claude  is  yet  more  introspective 
than  Werther,  for  Claude  is  worried  about  his  ideas 
as  well  as  about  his  feelings.  Werther,  Amiel,  De 
Musset,  Manfred,  the  hero  of  Locksley  Hall — they 
may  be  ranked  together  in  a  contingent  of  fighters 
against  themselves,  with  Hamlet  as  their  captain. 
In  order  to  keep  the  numbers  of  the  band  within 
reasonable  limits,  Russians  may  be  excluded.  It  is 
so  far  a  homogeneous  collection  that  all  its  members 
have  in  common  three  things :  sadness,  weakness  of 
will,  and  extreme  self-consciousness.  The  first  two 
are,  alas,  not  very  distinguishing  traits,  and  it  is  the 


AMOURS  DE  VOYAGE  125 

last  that  really  sets  these  young  men  apart  from 
their  kind.  But  to  call  them  all  self-conscious  is  still 
not  to  deny  that  there  may  exist  among  them  enor- 
mous differences.  Clough's  hero  differs  from  all  the 
rest  in  that  he  is  much  less  sensitive  than  any  of 
them.  He  is  only  half  sensitive  :  he  has  plenty 
of  moral  and  intellectual  sensitiveness,  but  he  is 
hardly  above  ordinary  in  respect  of  aesthetic  and 
emotional  sensitiveness.  Clough  could  not  endow 
his  Claude  with  passion  and  with  an  acute  sense  of 
beauty  because  he  lacked  these  himself.  For  the 
popularity  of  his  poem  this  is  a  desperate  want  :  it 
is  for  their  passionateness  and  their  keenness  of  per- 
ception that  Hamlet  and  Werther  have  been  loved. 
It  is  a  poor  compensation  that  Claude  is  the  truer 
to  his  age,  the  better  Victorian,  and  the  better  sensi- 
tive Victorian,  for  that  his  sensitiveness  is  thus 
limited. 

The  problem  with  which  Clough  poses  his  hero 
may  be  regarded  as  the  second  stage  in  a  problem 
of  Clough's  own.  He  had  worked  out  the  first  stage 
of  it  in  The  Bothie.  He  had  become  interested, 
rather  late,  and  in  his  serious  and  unimpulsive  way, 
in  love.  First  there  is  the  question  of  the  woman, 
and  that  is  talked  over  thoroughly  by  the  reading 
party  in  the  Highlands.  And  then,  having  thus 
provided  himself  with  a  theory  of  selection,  it  re- 
mains for  Clough  to  understand  and  to  explain  to 
himself  how  he  is  to  work  up  a  meet  degree  of  enthusi- 
asm for  a  young  woman  once  he  has  selected  her. 


126  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

He  is  moral  idealist  enough  to  desire  that  there  should 
be  no  reserves,  no  weak  spots,  in  his  loyalty  to  her. 
He  does  ijot  see  that  because  his  ideaHsm  is  wholly 
of  the  moral  kind  he  will  never  be  capable  of  be- 
lieving any  one  woman  to  be  immensely  superior  to 
all  others.  His  love  will  never  be  blind.  He  has  a 
premonition  of  this,  and  it  conflicts  with  his  desire 
to  love  without  any  consciousness  of  defect.  All 
this  is  anticipatory  of  the  actual  finding  of  the  lady 
and  resolving  to  win  her.  Yet  it  would  be  wrong 
to  think  that  the  spirit  in  which  Clough  approached 
the  matter  was  a  scientific,  or  a  pedantic,  or  a  coldly 
calculating  spirit.  These  are  byways  that  it  must 
ever  be  difficult  to  keep  out  of  in  thinking  about  love 
apart  from  a  specific  object  of  love  ;  but  Clough  had 
such  cleanness  and  reverence  in  him  as  enabled 
him  to  keep  out  of  them  as  well  as  any  man  could. 
The  finding  of  a  mate  filled  his  mind  before  it  filled 
his  heart.  But  his  thinking  about  it  was  as  earnest 
as  feeling  would  have  been  if  feeling  had  happened 
to  precede. 

How  to  fall  in  love  ?  Where  to  find  the  side  of 
the  angels  in  politics  ?  Whether  to  fight  for  other 
people's  womenfolk  ?  How  to  avoid  loneliness  ? — 
here  are  obstacles  enough  to  the  straightforward 
living  of  the  objective  life  that  is  made  to  seem  so 
simple  a  matter  in  The  Bothie.  Clough  is  feeling 
himself  baffled,  obviously.  On  account  of  his  baffle- 
ment he  belabours  himself,  in  the  person  of  Claude, 
for  weakness  of  will.     He  goes  too  far  in  his  self- 


Amours  de  voyage  127 

abasement,  and  makes  Claude  a  poor  creature,  which 
he  did  not  intend  to  do.  "I  have  no  intention  of 
sticking  up  for  him,"  he  writes  to  Palgrave,  "  but 
certainly  I  did  not  mean  him  to  go  off  into  mere 
prostration  and  defeat."  Yet  to  prostration  and 
defeat  the  reader  feels  that  this  unfortunate  hero 
goes.  And  readers  and  critics  have  gone  on  to  take 
Clough  as  equally  weak  of  will  with  his  creation. 
But  this  is  to  misrepresent  Clough  sadly.  Claude 
is  not  Clough — nor  even,  as  he  seemed  to  his  creator, 
one-half  of  a  dual  Clough.  It  was  imagination  that 
Clough  lacked,  not  will.  Things  to  do  did  not  readily 
present  themselves  to  him  ;  but  at  nearly  all  times 
in  his  life  he  is  perfectly  competent  to  initiate  and 
to  persist  in  a  difficult  course  of  action,  once  he  has 
become  aware  of  it  as  desirable.  All  his  friends 
admired  him  for  his  ability  to  make  rules  for  himself 
and  stand  by  them.  He  was  more  than  usually 
hesitant,  naturally,  in  a  year  in  which  the  routine 
of  his  life  was  interrupted.  But  the  man  who  had 
persistence  enough  to  translate  Plutarch  and  boldness 
enough  to  leave  Oxford  and  to  seek  his  fortune 
in  America,  was  no  Claude. 

Amours  de  Voyage  is  at  once  Clough's  most  care- 
fully wrought  poem  and  the  one  in  which  he  most 
clearly  betrays  his  limitations.  If  he  be  assumed 
to  have  betrayed  them  to  himself  also,  an  explanation 
is  provided  for  his  letting  the  work  go  unpublished 
so  long  a  time.  He  dares  comparison  in  the  Amours 
with  Shakespeare  and  with  Goethe,  and  these  are 


128  ARTHUR  HUGH   CLOUGH 

comparisons  that  he  cannot  endure.  Perhaps  he  did 
not  mean  Claude  to  be  a  thorough-going  idealist. 
But  he  makes  him  too  much  of  one  to  save  him 
from  the  fatal  contrast.  Claude  is  a  refined  and 
intelligent  young  man,  but  he  is  a  dwarf  in  the  line 
with  Werther  and  Faust  and  Hamlet.  His  tragedy 
is  their  tragedy — that  the  gulf  between  desire  and 
reality  cannot  be  bridged.  But  the  gulf  in  his  case 
is  not  magnificently  wide.  His  desire  has  not  been 
of  the  godlike  strength  to  create  for  him  a  vision 
of  such  a  world  as  that  which  Hamlet  saw,  or  Werther. 
These  won  their  stature  by  living  in  the  imagined 
world  and  adapting  themselves  to  it  until  they  were  all 
but  fit  to  inhabit  it  in  their  real  shapes.  With  Claude 
and  with  Clough,  even  the  height  of  youth  though 
pure  and  noble  had  been  earthly.  And  so  Claude 
lacks  the  charm  which  alone  can  make  a  hero  out 
of  another  kind  of  man  than  the  man  of  action,  and 
a  more  satisfactory  hero,  in  art,  than  the  man  of 
action  can  ever  be.  Clough  is  not  to  be  accused  of 
failing  to  reahze  something  of  this  ;  but  realizing 
it  he  should  have  seen — perhaps  did  see,  too  late — 
that  to  create  Claude  was  to  create  a  character  true 
enough,  indeed,  but  unattractive,  uninspiring,  and 
unprofitable. 


CHAPTER  VII 
DIPSYCHUS 

TO  Clough  as  to  Dante  the  crisis  of  life  came 
nel  mezzo  del  cammin.  He  wrote  his  three  long 
poems  in  three  successive  years,  the  thirtieth,  thirty- 
first,  and  thirty-second  of  his  life.  The  last  of  the 
three,  Dipsychus,  was  written  by  a  man  older  than 
the  author  of  the  first  of  them  by  much  more  than 
two  years.  The  Bothie,  of  1848,  is  a  poem  of  youth 
and  illusion  ;  Dipsychus,  of  1850,  is  a  work  of  dis- 
illusionment and  maturity.  And  that  Dipsychus  was 
left  unfinished  may  be  taken  to  symbolize  an  issuance 
from  the  crisis  that  was  not  wholly  victorious  :  that 
left  Clough  strengthened  for  the  living  out  of  his  own 
life,  indeed,  but  lamed  for  the  pursuit  of  the  poet's 
vocation  of  guiding  the  lives  of  others.  In  the  rest 
of  his  life  as  in  the  years  he  had  lived,  repression 
was  to  be  stronger  than  expression,  and  the  prudent 
and  responsible  member  of  society  stronger  than  the 
artist. 

Like  theworksof  the  two  preceding  yesirs,  Dipsychus 
is  the  product  of  a  vacation — though  it  is  far  from 
being  written  in  a  holiday  spirit.  When  he  wrote 
it,  or  started  to  write  it,  Clough  was  at  the  end  of  his 
first  year  of  residence  in  London  as  Head  of  University 

129  I 


130  ARTHUR   HUGH  CLOUGH 

Hall.  It  had  not  been  a  happy  year.  Clough  had  felt 
lonely  and  insecure,  and  dissatisfied  with  the  condi- 
tions and  the  prospects  of  his  new  work.  He  had  been 
finding  his  mind  turned  in  upon  itself  not  less  than 
at  Oxford,  as  he  had  so  greatly  hoped,  but  more.  The 
few  letters  that  are  preserved  from  this  year  are 
mostly  taken  up  with  moralizing.  The  morals  are  of 
an  exceptionally  sound  and  healthy  type  ;  and  the 
indication  from  this  as  to  the  moralizer  is,  of  course, 
that  his  desire,  and  so  his  lack  also,  of  health  of  mind 
were  exceptional.  "  There  is  a  great  blessing,  I 
sometimes  think,"  Clough  writes  to  Thomas  Arnold, 
"in  being  set  down  amongst  uncongenial  people." 
And  from  this  we  may  know  that  Clough 's  usual 
opinion  of  being  set  down  amongst  such  people  was 
that  it  was  anything  but  a  blessing.  "  Let  us  not 
sit  in  a  corner  and  mope,"  he  urges  in  the  same 
letter  ;  and  there  is  the  evidence  of  the  Memoiy  tha.t 
at  this  time  ''  he  became  depressed  and  reserved  to  a 
degree  quite  unusual  with  him  both  before  and  after- 
wards." It  was  the  worst  year  of  his  life.  In  a 
letter  of  May  185 1  he  writes :  "  Nothing  is  very  good 
anywhere,  I  am  afraid.  I  could  have  gone  cracked 
last  year  with  one  thing  or  another,  I  think,  but  the 
wheel  comes  round." 

Doubtless  Clough  hoped  to  help  the  wheel  come 
round  when  he  took  his  vacation  trip  to  Venice.  The 
journey  was  hasty,  taken  at  the  end  of  the  summer, 
and  no  such  letters  survive  to  record  it  as  those  which 
recount  the  earlier  and  more  cheerful  visits  to  Paris 


DIPSYCHUS  131 

and  to  Rome.  The  only  lasting  result  of  it  is  Dipsy- 
chus,  and  great  as  the  merits  of  Dipsychtcs,  are  there 
is  nothing  in  it  to  indicate  that  its  author  was 
incapable,  or  was  even  growing  less  capable,  of 
"going  cracked."  It  reveals  a  Clough  who  has 
reverted  from  the  healthy  objectivity  of  The  Bothie 
to  the  old  habit  of  tormenting  himself  with  doubts  : 
only  now  the  torment  is  more  critical,  and  fiercer. 
The  mind,  like  the  body,  creates  its  anti-toxins,  and 
Clough  found  himself  possessed  at  this  time  of  need 
with  a  priceless  new  agent — irony.  But  that  greatest 
of  curative  resources,  an  interest  in  life  round  about, 
had  departed  from  him.  Travel,  even  in  Italy,  was 
not  enough  to  bring  it  back.  Local  colour,  rich  in 
The  Bothie  and  Amours  de  Voyage,  in  Dipsychus 
scarcely  goes  beyond  the  bare  mention  of  various 
"  points  of  interest "  in  Venice  as  the  scenes  of  the 
hero's  successive  conversations  with  himself ;  the 
gondola  scene  is  an  exception,  but  the  stage-direction 
for  any  of  the~otEers  might  have  been  the  Nevsky 
Prospekt  as  well  as  The  Piazza,  and  the  Bois  de 
Boulogne  as  well  as  The  Public  Garden.  Clough 
cannot  possibly  have  enjoyed  his  journey.  Perhaps 
he  was  not  particularly  fond  of  the  poem  that  grew 
out  of  it.  He  did  not  publish  it  in  his  lifetime,  nor 
talk  much  about  it.  Charles  Eliot  Norton  included 
a  great  part  of  it  in  a  contribution  to  the  North 
American  Review  six  years  after  Clough' s  death.  It 
was  first  printed  in  the  collected  works  in  1869. 
Dipsychus  is  less  attractive  than  the  two  other 


132     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

long  poems,  and  probably  less  read.     They  are  about 
love,  and  Dipsychus  about  the  much  less  poetical 
subject  of  work.     Brave  dreams  are  more  likely  to 
arise  from  speculation  at  the  age  of  twenty  than  at 
thirty  on  the  subject  of  what  to  do  in  the  world. 
But   Dipsychus  is  the  most  thoughtful  and  honest 
and  intense  and  outspoken  of  the  three.     Few  poems 
of  anything  like  its  length  are  so  naive.     Clough  is 
revealing  the  state  of  his  innermost  mind,  directly, 
without  any  symbols  or  puppets  or  analogies.     If 
the  revelations  do  not  immediately  strike  a  reader 
as  intimate,  it  is  because  they  are  so  little  sensational. 
It  would  be  going  too  far,  perhaps,  to  say  confidently 
that  they  are  not  confessions  because  Clough  has 
nothing  to  confess  ;   but  certainly  his  life  has  been 
one  of  plain  living  and  high  thinking  to  a  very  un- 
usual degree.     It  was  possible,  therefore,  for  his  seLf- 
revelation  to  be  as  complete  as  Rousseau's  without 
possessing  any  of  that  naturalistic  and  scandalous 
familiarity  which  a  sort  of  universal  pessimism  is 
likely  to  take  as  the  proof   of   Rousseau's  or  any 
man's   veracity    concerning  the   facts   of   his   life. 
Dipsychus  is  the  best  possible  answer  to  the  careless 
acceptance  of  "  mid- Victorian  "  as  a  synonym  for 
hypocritical.     It  will  show,  to  any  but  an  excep- 
tionally superficial  or  an  exceptionally  subtle  cynic, 
high  scruples  surviving  unimpaired  by  a  most  rigor- 
ous and  clear-eyed  process  of  undeception  of  self. 
Also,  formless  as  it  is  as  a  whole,  Dipsychus  has 
real  poetry  in  it.     Clough  and  his  friends  agree  that 


DIPSYCHUS  133 

there  was  ordinarily  something  about  him  that  was 
cold  and  sluggish.  Even  in  the  days  of  his  in  tensest 
religious  feeling  he  did  not  get  excited  to  the  point 
of  nervousness.  But  the  unhappiness  and  the  un- 
certainty that  culminated  rfrthe~summer  of  1850 
brought  him  then  at  last  an  alertness  and  agility 
of  nerves  and  mind  quite  foreign  to  the  stateliness 
and  the  inertia  of  his  way  of  thinking  before  and 
after  that  time.  His  writing  becomes  rapid,  and 
strongly  rhythmical.     It  acquires ' a"  swmg  : 

"  '  There  is  no  God,'  the  wicked  saith, 
'  And  truly  it's  a  blessing, 
For  what  He  might  have  done  with  us 
It's  better  only  guessing.'  " 

Several  measures  are  used,  and  though  there  is  a 

plainness  about  all  the  verses,  a  number  of  them  are 

likely  to  stick  in  any  memory  : 

"  How  light  we  go,  how  soft  we  skim. 
And  all  in  moonlight  seem  to  swim  ! 
The  south  side  rises  o'er  our  bark 
A  wall  impenetrably  dark ; 
The  north  is  seen  profusely  bright ; 
The  water,  is  it  shade  or  light  ? 
Say,  gentle  moon,  which  conquers  now  ! — 
The  flood,  those  massy  hulls,  or  thou  ? 
(How  light  we  go,  how  softly  !     Ah, 
Were  life  but  as  the  gondola  !  " 

Clough's  is  still  an  inadequate  ear  for  a  poet ;  but  it 
is  better  than  it  has  been. 

Clough  employs  the  dramatic  form  for  his  poem, 
but  he  provides  no  drama.  There  are  but  the  two 
figures,  the  hero  and  his  projected  questioning  self, 


134     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

the  first  denoted  as  Dipsychus  and  the  second  as  the 
Spirit.  These  go  together  about  Venice,  ostensibly  to 
see  the  sights,  and  whenever  they  come  to  a  place 
with  a  well-known  name  they  are  stopped  and  set 
at  conversing.  Always  the  subject  of  the  conversa- 
tion is  the  same  :  Whether  to  remain  aloof  from 
the  world  and  preserve  ideal  dignity,  or  to  drop  down 
intoit  and  seciifeiiie  relief  of  being  hke  other  people. 
Nothing  happens ;  and  no  deceptive  hint  is  thrown 
out  that  anything  ever  will  happen.  One  feels  that 
Dipsychus  is  on  the  losing  side  in  the  argument, 
and  one  gathers  at  the  end  that  he  has  lost.  But 
the  steps  in  such  a  contention  need  to  be  marked 
and  pointed  by  events  and  changes  of  situation  in 
order  to  be  really  effective  in  a  work  intended  to  be 
I  poetic,  let  alone  dramatic.  And  these  events  and 
changes  Clough  is  too  single-mindedly  interested  in 
his  problem  itself  to  supply.  Without  them  the  divi- 
sion into  scenes  and  the  bald  stage-directions  "In 
St.  Mark's,"  "  At  Torcello,"  etc.,  are  scarcely  even 
tantalizing — merely  irritating.  All  this  is  bad  as  art 
but  good  as  truth  concerning  one  human  soul ;  and 
the  poem's  lack  of  dramatic  value  may  be  taken  as 
positively  increasing  its  moral  value,  and  especially 
its  historical  value  as  a  record  of  the  workings  of  a 
typical  nineteenth-century  mind. 

This  lack  of  ^famalic  value  is  so  complete  as  to 
make  Dipsychus  one  of  the  oddities  of  literature. 
No  work  of  William  Blake's  exhibits  a  more  thorough 
neglect  of  the  desires  and  habits  of  the  reading 


DIPSYCHUS  135 

public.  Dipsychus  is  discovered  in  the  first  scene 
scolding  himself  for  his  preoccupation  with  the  ideas 
of  a  poem  he  has  written  the  year  before — Clough's 
Easter  Day,  Naples,  1849.  His  attendant  ridicules 
him,  and  urges  him  to  eschew  anxiety  and  enjoy  the 
passing  hour.  Next,  the  two  are  in  the  Public 
Garden  ;  and  Dipsychus  from  fearing  there  is  no  God 
has  taken  to  fearing  that  his  motive  in  coming  to 
Venice  was  the  vulgar  one  of  fearing  (again)  to  be 
behind  the  times.  They  go  to  the  hotel,  where  the 
Spirit  lectures  his  slave  on  the  advantages  of  society. 
In  the  next  scene  occurs  all  that  can  be  called  action  in 
the  work.  The  hero  is  jostled  by  an  Austrian  officer, 
who  blames  him  for  the  collision  and  tells  him  to 
"  get  out."  The  thing  has  already  happened  when 
the  scene  opens,  and  the  meagre  account  of  it  comes 
out  only  incidentally  in  the  disquisition  as  to  what 
Dipsychus  will  do  about  it.  No  reader  could  be  so 
simple  as  to  suppose  there  was  ever  any  least  chance 
that  Dipsychus  would  do  anything  about  it.  So  it 
goes — one  talk  after  another  until  the  final  scene, 
in  which  Dipsychus  pettishly  tells  his  tempter  : 

"  So  your  poor  bargain  take,  my  man. 
And  make  the  best  of  it  you  can." 

Then  follows  an  Epilogue,  in  prose,  in  which  the  poet 
and  an  uncle  of  his  are  represented,  the  one  as  con- 
demning the  poem  directly  and  completely,  the  other 
as  damning  it,  in  defence,  with  the  faintest  of  praise. 
After  the  Epilogue  is  printed  Dipsydms  Contimted, 
A  Fragment.     In  this  there  are  three  scenes  ;  and  the 


136  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

time  of  them  is  thirty  years  after  the  conclusion  of  Part 
I.  The  action — and  there  really  is  a  certain  amount 
of  action  here,  at  last — takes  place  in  London.  The 
two-souled  hero  has  come  to  be  a  distinguished  judge. 
A  woman  comes  to  see  him  in  his  study,  and  reproves 
him  for  an  entanglement  they  two  had  got  into 
thirty  years  before.  She  tells  him  her  name  was 
formerly  Pleasure  and  now  is  Guilt.  Something  in 
that  change  of  name,  inadequately  explained,  has 
with  the  aged  Dipsychus  the  force  of  an  awful  revela- 
tion. He  resigns  the  Lord  Chief  Justiceship,  and  it 
is  noised  about  by  "  Barristers  "  in  the  second  scene 
that  he  is  dying.  He  does  not  die  before  he  has 
taken  up  another  scene  with  his  favourite  activity 
of  soliloquizing  on  the  very  subjects  he  least  likes 
to  think  about.  When  the  scene  breaks  off  abruptly 
and  the  poem  ends,  he  has  still  done  nothing  so  con- 
crete and  practical  as  to  die.  The  reader  wonders 
how  Clough  refrained  from  the  opportunity  that 
was  his  alone  to  provide  a  violent,  discreditable,  and 
safely  final  ending  for  this  most  vexatious  of  heroes. 
Dipsychus  is  constructed  on  a  thought  plot  rather 
than  an  action  plot.  But  the  thought  plot  also  is 
lacking  in  orderliness.  Stages  of  progress  go  un- 
marked. The  central  difficulty  is  that  Dipsychus 
reluctantly  and  passively  allows  truth  to  drive  him, 
instead  of  going  out  boldly  to  find  truth.  It  is  a 
conflict  of  attrition.  A  temperament  is  arrayed 
against  facts,  and  refusing  to  take  the  offensive  is 
worn  down  until  it  makes  a  sudden  submission,  still 


DIPSYCHUS  137 

not  decisively,  but  with  reserves  and  backward 
glances.  The  factual  world  speaks  against  Dipsychus 
in  the  voice  of  "  The  Spirit."  This  Spirit  considers 
it  unimportant  to  make  clear  just  who  he  is.  Cos- 
mocrator  is  the  one  of  his  many  titles  he  seems  most 
to  approve  ,  and  he  has  no  quarrel  with  the  final 
appellation  Dipsychus  bestows  on  him  : 

"  The  Power  of  this  World !  hateful  unto  God." 

He  is  Environment,  summoning  a  lethargic  human 
soul  to  free  its  energies  and  express  itself  in  the  only 
way  in  which  soul  can  express  itself,  in  action.  And 
the  soul  objects  that  such  expression  involves 
mingling  with  matter,  and  so  losing  its  purity.  It 
is  a  soul  of  such  muddy  metal  that  it  cannot  be 
brought  to  want  to  express  itself,  but  only  to  see 
that,  in  the  light  of  the  wisdom  of  the  past,  self- 
expression  is  a  duty  and  is  salvation.  Dipsychus 
is  breaking  away  from  old  things,  not  because  he  has 
exhausted  their  benefits  and  is  yearning  for  new 
things,  but  because  the  old  things  have  become  ab- 
solutely intolerable,  and  the  new,  in  spite  of  a 
repellent  appearance,  may  not  be  positively  less 
disagreeable.  This  is  to  put  the  moral  conflict, 
everybody's  conflict,  into  a  form  not  only  too  ab- 
stract to  be  dramatic,  but,  merely  as  argument,  too 
general  to  be  novel,  and  too  passive  to  be  stimulating. 
A  good  train  of  narrative  might  have  satisfied  all  these 
objections.  Never  did  a  work  of  art  stand  in  greater 
need  of  a  story.     It  was  a  particularly  perverse 


138      ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

stroke  of  Clough's  fate  which  kept  him  from  using 
a  little  of  the  creditable  skill  at  narration  which  he 
discloses  in  Amours  de  Voyage  and  Man  Magno  in 
the  writing  of  Dipsychns. 

This,  with  all  its  shortcomings,  is  the  poem  which 
has  been  called  the  English  Faust.  Clough  himself, 
who  risked  the  comparison,  must  have  seen  how  dis- 
astrous it  was  to  himself.  Drama,  the  colour  of  life, 
movement,  wealth  of  character,  or deily  development 
of  idea — all  the  great  qualities  Dipsychus  lacks, 
Faust  possesses.  The  Enghsh  work  is  a  skeleton  by 
the  side  of  the  German.  It  originated,  of  course,  in  a 
much  slighter  set  of  intentions.  Faust  is  the  work 
of  a  lifetime,  Dipsychus  of  a  season.  Goethe  selected 
widely  separated  intervals  of  exceptional  spiritual 
health  for  working  on  his  masterpiece  ;  Clough's 
writing  was  done  in  a  temporary  fit  of  very  serious 
and  depressing  anxiety  concerning  his  future.  This 
has  much  to  do  with  another  very  great  difference 
between  the  two  poems  :  that  Faust  is  universal, 
and  Dipsychus  is  narrowly  limited.  In  the  mind  of 
the  one  writer  his  symbols  adapted  themselves  at 
different  times  to  a  great  range  of  different  aspects 
of  the  problem  of  life  ,  so  they  secure  an  adaptability 
which  in  the  minds  of  readers  can  be  carried  still 
farther.  But  the  mind  of  the  other  poet  was  intent 
on  one  problem  throughout,  and  considered  it  in 
literal  terms,  of  no  general  apphcability.  Hence 
everybody  can  see  himself,  and  see  humanity  gener- 
ally, in  Faust ;    but  only  the  narrow  class  of  self- 


DIPSYCHUS  139 

tormentors  can  see  themselves  in  Dipsychus.  The 
most  obvious  of  all  the  superiorities  of  the  German 
poem  is  that  its  hero  is  so  much  greater  a  man  than 
the  leading  figure  of  the  English  work.  He  is  greater 
because  he  has  tremendously  more  energy.  He  can 
meet  life,  survive  its  blows,  and  master  it ;  and 
Dipsychus  Continued  does  not  fool  us  into  thinking 
that  there  was  ever  force  enough  in  Clough's  creature 
to  enable  him  to  attain  a  Lord  Chief  Justiceship  or 
any  other  of  the  prizes  for  vigorous  and  successful 
living.  Both  heroes  were  dreamers,  but  the  English- 
man had  no  really  great  vision.  Peace  and  piety 
were  the  onlj^TOnditions  of  life  that  really  attracted 
him  ;  he  admits  work,  action,  to  a  place  among 
his  ideals  without  any  enthusiasm  for  it,  and  without 
any  appreciation  of  what  the  joys  of  action  really  are. 
Clough  was  not  egotist  enough  ever  to  think  con- 
fidently of  himself  as  doing  widely  effective  things 
with  his  own  life  ;  and  the  rule  held  in  his  case  that 
man  cannot  conceive  a  character  very  much  superior 
to  himself  at  his  best. 

There  are,  perhaps,  a  few  compensatory  advantages 
on  the  side  of  Dipsychus.  One  has  already  been 
suggested — absence  not  meiely  of  melodrama,  but  of 
drama,  may  be  taken  as  a  point  of  superiority  in  an 
attempt  to  represent  the  essential  conflict  of  life  just 
exactly  as  it  really  is.  Truth  may  be  there  none  the 
less  for  its  failure  to  become  apparent  to  minds  accus- 
tomed to  think  of  life  as  dramatic.  And  Faust  is 
not  merely  dramatic,  but  very  theatrical — written 


140     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

with  the  demands  of  the  stage  most  prominently  in 
mind  ;  whereas  if  Clough  ever  saw  a  play  in  all  his 
life,  he  at  any  rate  never  makes  mention  of  the  fact 
in  any  of  his  letters  or  other  writings.  Yet  he 
seems  to  have  thought  he  could  write  a  play  ;  and 
the  completely  undramatic  nature  of  his  effort  as 
it  stands  may  be  largely  due  to  the  accident  of  failure 
to  carry  through  the  work  as  designed.  The  frag- 
ment of  Dipsychus  Continued  suggests  that  Clough 
intended  to  furnish  some  sort  of  Venetian  Gretchen 
to  attract  his  hero  in  intervals  between  sohloquies. 
One  feels  that  the  world  suffered  no  great  deprivation 
of  knowledge  of  things  as  they  are  when  Clough  thus 
held  his  hand  from  delineating  such  a  daughter  of 
Venice  as  he  could  represent  saying  thirty  years  later 
that  her  name  was  Guilt,  and  had  once  been  Pleasure. 
Doubtless  Clough  would  have  claimed  sympathy  with 
such  a  type  ;  but  how  much  real  and  effective 
sympathy  had  he  ever  at  this  time  given  himself 
occasion  for  feeling  toward  any  one  outside  his  own 
academic  circle  of  hfe  ?  He  is  far  behind  Goethe 
in  experience.  From  this  inferiority  also  it  is  possible, 
casuistically  peihaps,  to  make  out  for  Clough' s  poem 
an  advantage  in  the  comparison.  The  principal 
reason  why  Clough' s  experience  was  poorer  was  that 
he  had  long  had  to  confront  the  problem  of  making  a 
living,  as  the  Frankfort  patrician  never  in  his  life 
had  to  confront  it.  This  is  but  another  angle  of 
approach  to  the  greater  realism  claimed  for  the  Enghsh 
poem.     The  homeliness  and  indignity  of  work  were 


DIPSYCHUS  141 

well  concealed  from  Goethe  by  the  ceremony  and  the 
distinction  of  his  position  at  a  sovereign,  though  tiny, 
court.  Work  under  such  conditions  was  not  the 
matter  of  enduring  and  submitting  that  it  is  for  most 
men.  But  what  it  is  for  most  men  it  was  for  Clough. 
He  is  with  Hardy  and  with  many  another  in  beheving 
that  as  years  and  centuries  pass  living  will  be  seen 
as  enduring,  more  and  more.  Such  a  trend  would 
be  anything  but  unfavourable  to  the  reputation  of 
Dipsychus. 

It  is  interesting  to  observe  the  forms  in'  which 
Clough  expresses  ideas  which  are  parallel  to  Goethe's 
ideas,  and  no  doubt  partly  refinements  of  them.  For 
instance,  Dipsychus  reflects  in  the  course  of  one  of 
his  longest  speeches  : 

"  What  we  call  sin 
I  could  believe  a  painful  opening  out 
Of  paths  for  ampler  virtue.    The  bare  field. 
Scant  with  lean  ears  of  harvest,  long  had  mocked 
The  vext  laborious  farmer ;    came  at  length 
The  deep  plough  in  the  lazy  undersoil 
Down-driving ;    with  a  cry  earth's  fibres  crack. 
And  a  few  months,  and  lo  !  the  golden  leas. 
And  autumn's  crowded  shocks  and  loaded  wains. 
Let  us  look  back  on  life  ;    was  any  change. 
Any  now  blest  expansion,  but  at  first 
A  pang,  remorse-Uke,  shot  to  the  inmost  seats 
Of  moral  being  ?  " 

This  is  obviously  an  expansion,  or  a  contraction,  of 
Mephistopheles*  description  of  himself  as : 

"  Ein  Teil  von  jener  Kraft, 
Die  stets  das  Bose  will,  und  stets  das  Gute  schafft." 


142     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

Goethe's  words  give  a  clear-cut  idea  of  Natural  Instinct 
driving  violently  against  the  beneficent  power  of 
Reason,  and  throwing  it  back,  and  so  providing  it 
with  ever  new  occasions  for  triumphant  progress. 
But  Clough's  figure  of  the  plough  in  the  undersoil  is 
far  from  showing  any  understanding  of  the  workings 
and  uses  of  sin.  For  there  is  nothing  evil  in  what 
a  plough  intends,  nor  in  what  it  is.  Sin  is  really  the 
soil,  with  Clough,  instead  of  the  plough — the  lazy  sub- 
soil that  is  reluctant  to  be  of  service.  It  is  not  a  force, 
it  is  the  absence  of  force.  He  develops  this  notion 
in  the  lines  that  follow  the  passage  just  quoted  : 

"  To  leave  the  habitual  and  the  old,  and  quit 
The  easy-chair  of  use  and  wont,  seems  crime 
To  the  weak  soul,  forgetful  how  at  first 
Sitting  down  seemed  so  too." 

It  is  Dipsychus  himself  that  must  represent  sin  so 
conceived,  while  the  Spirit  stands  for  the  opposite 
principle  of  good.  There  is  a  muddle  here,  not  incap- 
able of  being  removed  ;  but  Clough  failed  to  remove 
it.  His  reason  is  on  the  side  of  the  Spirit  and  his 
temperament  on  the  side  of  Dipsychus  ;  and  so  he 
befriends  Dipsychus  while  bringing  him  to  defeat, 
and  slurs  the  Spirit  while  he  is  according  him  victory. 
He  protects  his  inconsistency  by  refusing  to  distin- 
guish his  rival  forces  specifically  as  the  Good  and  the 
Bad — ^which  is  an  unfortunate  refusal  to  make  in  the 
writing  of  a  moral  poem. 

Clough's  idea  of  sin  lacks  boldness  and  definition 
when  compared  with  Goethe's  because  Clough's  sins 


DIPSYCHUS  143 

had  never  been  bold  and  definite.  He  had  quelled  his 
own  instincts  too  early  and  too  successfully  to  know 
much  about  passion.  And  with  the  force  of  passion 
there  had  atrophied  in  him  the  force  of  aspiration. 
Virtue  had  become  negative  and  Puritan.  Having 
shunned  the  lower  rungs  of  the  Platonic  ladder  of 
admirations,  he  had  no  way  of  rising  again  to  the 
higher  stages  of  the  ascent,  once  he  had  descended 
from  them  in  abandoning  the  god  of  his  youth.  He 
does  not  attempt  to  supply  in  his  poem  anything 
corresponding  to  Goethe's  "  das  EwigweibHche." 
The  unhappy  Dipsychus  is  cut  off  from  the  possiblity, 
of  being  helped  up  and  on  by  any  powerful  force  of 
attraction.  He  cannot  rise  by  thinking  of  a  goal 
to  be  won  :  if  he  is  to  rise  at  all  it  must  be  by  painful 
deliberation  on  the  process  itself — by  sheer  tugging 
at  his  own  boot-straps.  By  such  a  representation, 
instead  of  "  clothing  our  modern  existence  with 
poetry,  "  as  Emerson  says  Goethe  did,  Clough  de- 
prived existence  of  the  principal  rag  of  poetry  that 
properly  belongs  to  it. 

A  true  poet  ought  to  find  life  beautiful  anywhere  ; 
and  Clough  does  not  find  life  beautiful  in  Venice  ! 
Is  there  any  excuse  for  the  poem,  then  ?  Is  there' 
an  excuse  for  any  work  of  art  which  concerns  itself 
not  with  the  beautiful,  but  only  with  the  doubtful, 
and  the  despairing,  and  the  negative  ?  Any  answer 
to  these  questions  but  a  flat  No  must  seek  to  point 
out  beauty  under  very  effective  masks.  The  beauty 
of  Dipsychus  is  dressed  in  the  grimmest  of  guises  : 


1 


144     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

it  inheres  in  the  honesty  and  the  courage  of  an 
unimaginative  and  an  unswerving  self-examination. 
It  has  been  called  the  saddest  poem  ever  written. 
If  it  is  terribly  sad  to  see  a  man  hunt  to  the  depths 
of  himself  and  find  so  little  to  satisfy  him,  it  is  at 
least  cheering  to  see  him  make  the  search,  for  once, 
and  survive  his  disappointment — and  even  write 
rather  gaily  about  it.  Yet  it  is  not  to  be  denied  that 
Dipsychus  has  the  effect  of  a  poem  of  despair. 

To  compare  it  with  another  English  p«m  of 
despair,  of  the  immediately  preceding  generation,  is 
not  merely  to  illustrate  a  change  of  fashions  in  the 
way  of  despair,  but  to  show  alongside  of  a  denied 
despair  which  is  depressing  a  professed  despair  which 
is  positively  exhilarating.  Manfred  is  sick  of  life 
to  the  point  of  attempting  suicide,  and  he  finally 
dies  hating  and  reviling  all  men  and  all  spirits  good 
and  bad.  But  he  does  not  actually  commit  suicide, 
and  his  revilings  somehow  show  him  endowed  with 
enormous  zest  for  human  life  and  the  contemplation 
of  superhuman  spirits.  If  any  protagonist  of  Clough's 
had  ever  thought  seriously  of  suicide,  his  stern 
creator  would  have  compelled  him  to  go  through 
with  it ;  and  furthermore  Clough  himself  would 
have  felt  duty  bound  to  commit  suicide  as  soon  as 
he  had  finished  working  out  to  this  conclusion  the 
problem  of  his  puppet.  Anything  else  he  would  have 
thought  dishonest.  This  advantage  in  honesty  that 
Clough's  work  has  over  Byron's  is  obvious  from  start 
to  finish  of  the  two  works.     And  Clough  has  an 


DIPSYCHUS  145 

equally  unquestionable  superiority  in  soundness  and 
depth  of  thought.  From  the  level  of  dough's 
thinking,  Manfred's  pride  in  his  guilt  and  his  valour  in 
the  presence  of  threatening  spooks  are  absurd.  In 
this  sense  Clough  is  far  above  assuming  to  crush  a 
mighty  Demon  with  such  words  as  : 

"  I  have  not  been  thy  dupe,  nor  am  thy  prey — 
But  was  my  own  destroyer,  and  will  be 
My  own  hereafter.    Back,  ye  baffled  fiends  ! 
The  hand  of  death  is  on  me — ^but  not  yours  !  " 

Yet   a   majority   of   readers   professing   to   esteem 
intelligence  and  honesty  as  '*  the  two  noblest  of 
things  "will  agree  that  Byron  is  greater  than  Clough 
and  writes  about  despair  much  more  arrestingly.   For 
what  matters  ultimately  is  that  Byron  has  more 
passion  than  Clough  and  more  energy.     And  in  pas- 
sion and  energy — ^no  matter  how  unseeing  and  mis- 
guided and  marked  for  death — is  hope,  and  strength 
and  sense  ;   but  sluggishness,  and  the  necessity  for 
forcing  an  interest  in  the  world,  no  matter  how 
honest  and  intelligent  they  may  be,  are  a  distinctly 
inferior  sort  of  thing.     In  a  universe  which  is  move- 
ment, Byron  and  Manfred,  who  move,  are  greatei 
than  Clough  and  Dipsychus,  who  do  not,  and  the  age 
of  Byron  in  literature  greater  than  the  age  of  Clough 
Much  of  the  sadness  of  Dipsychus  proceeds  from 
the  disproof  it  affords  of  the  Proverb:  "He  that 
ruleth  his  spirit  is  better  than  he  that  taketh  a  city.' 
For  the  meaning  of  that  verse,  to  anybody  who  has 
been  attracted  by  it  in  modern  times,  is  that  having 

K 


146     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

once  ruled  himself  a  man  may  go  on  confidently 
to  the  taking  of  a  city.  But  Dipsychus,  like  Clough, 
has  ruled  himself  and  is  unable  to  conquer  a  village 
or  even  a  good  job,  let  alone  a  city.  It  is  the  man 
of  the  Middle  Ages  to  whom  that  situation  is  satis- 
factory. Surely  the  moderns  are  right  in  thinking 
that  unless  a  man  arrives  at  the  taking  of  his  city — 
that  is,  gets  something  done  in  the  world — there 
is  no  particular  point  to  his  ruling  himself.  Than 
such  a  man,  he  who  has  taken  cities  without  having 
ruled  himself  is  much  more  admired.  Manfred  is  a 
good  example  of  a  hero  of  this  class.  He  flatters 
that  one  of  the  twin  selves  in  which  man  naturally 
takes  much  the  more  pride  and  joy — the  self  that 
needs  ruling,  not  the  self  that  rules.  This  is  the  self 
that  yearns  and  imagines  and  initiates,  and  this  is 
the  self  that  is  the  rightful  source  and  subject  of 
poetry.  The  heroes  it  sets  up  may  have  great 
imperfections,  but  the  critical  spirit  which  objects 
to  these  imperfections  in  Manfred  will  still  be  human 
enough  not  to  find  the  congenially  critical  Dipsychus 
preferable  to  him. 

Greater  than  either  of  the  half-way  conquerors, 
Dipsychus  and  Manfred,  is  Faust,  who  discovers 
that  "  Geniessen  macht  gemein  " — conquers  himself 
— and  then  goes  on  to  do  such  serviceable  things  as 
to  make  wheat-fields  out  of  a  swamp.  Faust  re- 
cognises the  test  of  social  utility.  But  Clough  had 
not  at  the  time  he  wrote  Dipsychus  got  genuinely 
into  the  way  of  looking  at  life  as  an  affair  between  the 


DIPSYCHUS  147 

individual  and  society  :  his  habit  was  too  strong  of 
seeing  it  as  ah  affair  between  man  and  God.  He 
had  been  very  thoroughly  taught  that  the  end  of 
man  was  to  glorify  God,  and  was  at  this  time  engaged 
in  the  process,  to  the  last  not  completely  successful, 
of  'persuading  himself  that  the  end  of  man  is  to 
cherish  and  quicken  life.  He  was  retarded  in  this 
transition  by  the  powerful  influence  on  him  of 
Carlyle.  Carlyle  tells  man  to  work  in  the  world 
for  the  good  of  his  soul,  and  for  the  good  of  Soul 
generally — of  the  Absolute.  The  last,  of  course, 
comes  to  the  same  selfish  thing  as  the  first,  when  one 
refuses,  as  Carlyle  did,  to  recognize  any  particular 
piece  of  work  doing  or  proposed  in  his  own  world 
as  worth  the  expenditure  of  effort.  Clough  gets 
a  little  ahead  of  Carlyle  on  this  point  but  he  remains 
behind  Goethe.  It  required  immense  vitaUty,  in 
addition  to  clearness  of  vision,  to  see  life  as  Goethe 
saw  it  :  Clough  lacked  the  necessary  vitality.  He 
caught  the  idea,  and  merely  as  idea,  held  it  in  an 
even  truer  form  than  Goethe  held  it  in,  because  he 
knew  what  work  was  so  much  better  than  Goethe 
did.  But  he  failed  to  surround  it  with  feeling  and 
will ;  and  the  pragmatic  idea  is  one  that  requires 
especially  large  elements  of  will  and  feeling.  Great 
stocks  of  will  and  feeling  were  in  Clough,  but  long  and 
severe  restraint  had  made  it  impossible  to  use  them 
with  any  freedom.  Particularly  at  the  time  he  wrote 
Dipsychus,  he  was  much  in  the  condition  of  the 
athlete  who  is  "muscle-bound." 


148     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

Everybody  agrees  that  Goethe  was  a  pragmatist : 
or  that  pragmatism  is  at  least  as  good  a  word  as 
any  other  for  his  comprehensive  philosophy.  A 
French  scholar,  M.  Edouard  Guyot,  has  recently 
developed  the  idea  that  Clough  was  a  pragmatist — 
though  also  a  rationahst — and  an  important  precursor 
of  that  way  of  thinking  which  its  founders  insist  is 
so  old  that  to  talk  about  precursors  of  it,  at  any  rate 
in  modem  times,  is  scarcely  to  the  point. 

For  a  poet  to  be  regarded  as  showing  pragmatic 
tendencies,  M.  Guyot  says,  it  will  be  necessary,  first, 
"  that  the  idea  of  action  should  hold  an  important 
place  in  his  work,  and  that  toward  it  should  con- 
verge more  than  one  psychological  conflict  "  ;  and 
second,  "  that  this  idea  should  have  presented  itself 
to  the  author  at  a  time  when  he  was  seeking  truth 
for  its  own  sake,  and  that  he  should  have  accepted 
it,  not  because  he  was  satisfied  with  it  instinctively, 
not  because  of  the  positive  advantages  which  are 
attached  to  it,  but  because  it  gives  to  his  curiosity 
or  to  his  uncertainty  a  satisfaction  as  clear,  as 
complete,  as  that  which  a  person  of  different  tempera- 
ment would  derive  from  a  solution  based  upon  recogni- 
tion of  the  absolute,  upon  a  definitive  and  unbroken 
arrangement  of  the  universe." 

Of  these  two  tests  Clough  certainly  meets  the 
first.  But  it  is  not  a  very  significant  test.  It  wiU 
estabUsh,  not  so  much  whether  a  poet  is  a  pragmatist, 
as  whether  he  is  in  any  degree  either  a  philosopher  or 
a  moralist,  and  so  given  to  the  use  of  abstract  terms. 


DIPSYCHUS  149 

For  in  any  philosophy  worthy  of  the  name,  and  in 
any  system  of  morals,  "  the  idea  of  action  will  hold 
an  important  place."  It  is  a  thing  man  has  to  think 
about ;  and  the  psychological  conflicts  of  sage  and 
clown  alike  converge  toward  it,  and  in  fact  never 
converge  toward  anything  else.  It  holds  an  impor- 
tant place  with  Kant,  and  with  all  the  post-Kantian 
idealists.  By  its  other  name,  work,  it  holds  a  very 
important  place  with  Carlyle,  and  few  men  are  to 
be  described  as  pragmatists  less  aptly  than  he.  To 
work  only  for  the  mortification  of  the  flesh  and  the 
enrichment  of  the  soul,  and  meanwhile  to  consent 
to  see  as  valuable  in  itself  no  single  piece  of  work 
actually  going  forward  in  one's  own  world,  is  not 
in  all  respects  a  different  thing  from  sitting  graci- 
ously on  spikes  and  calling  oneself  a  Buddhist.  It 
is  a  very  different  thing  from  pragmatism.  If  prag- 
matic is  to  mean  anything  specific  it  must  surely  be 
limited  to  a  philosophy  which  gives  action  not  an 
important,  but  the  important  place  :  to  a  philosophy 
which  celebrates  action  not  merely  as  the  means,  but 
also  as  the  end.  And  by  this  more  exciting  test  for 
pragmatism,  Clough  is  very  much  less  of  a  prag- 
matist. 

M.  Guyot  finds  that  Clough  successfully  meets 
his  second  test  also.  The  decision  here  may  perhaps 
be  taken  to  depend  on  what  is  meant  by  being  satis- 
fied with  an  idea.  In  the  last  years  of  his  life,  when, 
if  ever,  Clough  was  a  pragmatist,  he  does  indeed 
appear  to  have  enjoyed  a  considerable  measure  of 


150  ARTHUR  HUGH  OLOUGH 

contentment.  He  went  about  his  work,  and  he  loved 
his  wife  and  children  ;  and  "  to  be  happy  at  home," 
says  Dr.  Johnson,  "  is  the  ultimate  result  of  all 
ambition."  On  the  other  hand,  he  did  not  in  these 
years  work  with  anything  like  the  enthusiasm  which 
he  possessed  in  the  days  when  he  held  a  fixed  belief 
in  the  Christian  God.  Something  of  this  may  be 
laid  to  increasing  age — though  Clough's  age  increased 
so  Uttle  beyond  forty.  But  whatever  may  be  true 
in  the  case  of  any  other  kind  of  philosophy,  to  be 
really  satisfied  with  a  philosophy  of  action  implies 
very  much  more  than  mere  contentment  with  routine. 
It  implies  action  that  represents  constant  and  eager, 
effort.  It  impHes  an  interest  in  the  doings  of  the 
world  which  will  necessitate  a  struggle,  not  inevit- 
ably selfish,  to  play  as  considerable  a  part  in  them 
as  possible.  It  implies  these  things,  in  a  sense,  even 
for  the  professed  philosopher,  who  has  chosen  specu- 
lation for  his  work  in  life.  It  implies  them  much 
more  in  the  case  of  a  man  still  young  and  still  not 
irrevocably  committed  to  any  single  kind  of  work. 
Satisfaction,  with  these  implications,  the  years  of 
Clough's  life  after  he  began  talking  so  much  about 
action  can  scarcely  be  said  to  exhibit  at  all  remark- 
ably. But  to  enlarge  upon  this  point  would  be  to 
anticipate  a  later  chapter. 

M.  Guyot  sees  Clough's  philosophy  of  action 
revealed  in  full  in  Dipsychus.  At  any  rate  Dipsychus 
is  the  most  philosophical  of  the  poems  :  The  Bothie 
indicates,  but  does  not  attempt  fully  to  reveal,  a 


DIPSYCHUS  151 

philosophy  that  is  more  confidently  and  more  purely 
a  philosophy  of  action.  Dipsychus  was  the  poet's 
professed  effort  to  think  through  the  relation  between 
the  soul  and  matter— not  metaphysically,  indeed, 
but  morally.  It  attacks  the  question,  whether  it  is 
well  to  try  to  expand  and  strengthen  that  relation 
— which  is  action.  Goethe,  in  his  try  at  the  problem, 
makes  Faust  definitely  successful  in  his  struggles 
with  the  world.  At  the  end  of  the  poem  the  hero 
is  triumphant.  In  what  we  have  of  Dipsychus  either 
of  two  pauses  may  be  accepted  as  the  conclusion  : 
the  abrupt  breaking-off  of  Dipsychus  Continued,  or, 
eliminating  that  distinctly  inferior  sequel,  the  con- 
cluding scene  of  Part  II  of  the  poem  itself.  The 
opening  lines  of  Dipsychus  Continued  are  in  key  with 
what  follows  them,  and  they  are  not  suggestive  of 
triumph.     Says  Dipsychus,  alone  in  his  study: 

"  O  God  !  O  God  !     and  must  I  still  go  on 
Doing  this  work — I  know  not,  hell's  or  Thine !  " 

Clough  was  not  a  pragmatist,  nor  fractionally  a 
pragmatist,  when  he  wrote  this  as  the  serious 
exclamation  of  a  Lord  Chief  Justice  of  England  not 
definitely  intended  as  either  villain  or  fool.  It  is 
only  fair  to  Clough  to  accept  the  earlier  stopping- 
point.  To  do  this  is  a  kindness  more  to  his  reputation 
as  artist  than  to  his  reputation  as  philosopher.  For 
it  is  substituting  an  inconclusive  for  a  conclusive 
ending.  It  is  substituting  for  a  conclusion  definitely 
against  a  philosophy  of  action,  one  that  accepts 
such  a  philosophy  only  bitterly  and  hopelessly,  in 


152     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

despair  of  keeping  hold  of  any  other.  No  more  in  the 
life  of  his  hero  than  in  his  own  life  does  Clough 
show  the  philosophy  of  action  leading  to  happiness, 
to  security,  or  to  real  accomplishment. 

Dipsy chits  is  Clough 's  best  poem,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  student  of  him,  for  the  very  reason  that 
it  shows  Clough  at  his  weakest.  At  other  times  he  is 
writing  guardedly  as  the  man  he  wills  himself  to  be  ; 
now  press  of  circumstances  has  broken  down  the 
guard,  and  the  undermost  Clough,  the  temperament 
of  the  man,  speaks  out.  It  speaks  out,  not  indeed 
as  the  whole  man,  but  at  least  as  more  than  half 
of  him .  And  this  temperament  is  unalterably  oppose  d 
to  a  pragmatic  way  of  taking  things.  It  has  spent  so 
great  and  so  dear  a  part  of  its  life  in  revering  the  very 
highest  things  that  it  cannot  be  brought  to  revere 
things  around.  Thinking  that  action  is  the  vital 
concern,  willing  frantically  to  become  a  man  of 
action,  does  not  avail.  The  tender  conscience  per- 
severes in  looking  inward  and  upward,  and  refuses 
to  look  round  about.  This  is  a  principal  reason 
why  Dipsychus  is  so  sad  a  poem.  A  man  who  has 
always  managed  himself  well  and  bravely  tries  to 
command  one  last  great  improvement  in  himself, 
and  his  command  is  not  obeyed.  He  tries  to  carry 
off  the  failure  jauntily,  by  assuming  that  it  is  rather 
a  success.  But  he  fails  to  convince  himself,  as,  with 
a  few  exceptions,  he  fails  to  convince  the  readers 
of  his  poem. 

What  might  have  enabled  Clough  to  become  a 


DIPSYCHUS  153 

true  pragmatist  was  a  firm  belief  in  some  theory  of 
evolution.  Goethe  had  such  a  belief.  Carlyle  had 
none,  and  lived  the  less  happily  for  the  want  of  it. 
Germs  of  such  a  theory  may  be  found  in  The  Bothie  ; 
but  Clough  failed  to  cherish  them.  He  had  no  train- 
ing in  science,  and  little  that  was  scientific  in  his 
habit  of  mind.  There  is  nothing  to  show  it  ever 
occurred  to  him  that  hope  could  come  from  this 
source.  If  he  read  the  great  books  that  paved  the 
way  for  Darwin,  he  never  speaks  of  them.  Native 
individualism,  training,  association,  chance,  prevented 
him  from  gaining  friendly  acquaintance  with  the 
historical  way  of  taking  the  world ;  and  so  his 
immensely  reverent  spirit  missed  its  chance  of 
attaching  itself  to  the  only  ideal  that  could  have  been 
an  adequate  substitute  for  the  God  of  his  youth. 
To  believe  in  action,  and  neither  in  a  clearly  con- 
ceived God  nor  in  Evolution  is  to  try  to  live  by 
bread  alone.  "  What  system  of  philosophy  you 
hold,"  says  Fichte,  "depends  wholly  upon  what 
manner  of  man  you  are."  And  Clough  was  the  kind 
of  man  who  cannot  live  by  bread  alone.  The  idea 
that  so  to  live  might,  however,  be  the  secret  of  living 
introduced  into  the  latter  part  of  his  life  a  more 
deadly  discord,  though  he  kept  it  suppressed,  than 
any  of  the  uncertainties  of  his  Oxford  days. 

The  upshot  of  dough's  philosophizing,  then,  was 
only  destructive.  Dipsychus  was  an  imintentional 
warning  to  its  readers  against  a  too  complete  adher- 
ence to  the  doctrines  of  Carlyle.     Had  it  appeared  in 


154     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

the  year  of  its  composition,  it  would  probably  have 
made  much  more  stir  than  it  created  when  it  finally 
appeared,  a  decade  after  The  Origin  of  Species.  It 
would  have  met  a  very  violent  opposition,  and  it 
would  have  represented  fairly  well  the  state  of  mind 
of  persons  critical  of  the  teachings  of  the  Church,  and 
would  have  prepared  them  to  welcome  the  ideas 
of  Darwin  and  Spencer  and  Comte.  Published  at 
the  end  of  the  'sixties  it  served  no  such  purpose.  It 
was  doomed  then  to  unpopularity  with  both  parties  : 
for  the  heretical  were  strong  now  in  the  possession 
of  a  new  science  and  of  a  new  religion,  the  **  Religion 
of  Humanity,"  and  could  not  be  greatly  pleased  with 
a  poem  which  expressed  only  the  more  negative  of 
their  opinions,  and  expressed  even  these,  not  ring- 
ingly,  but  bitterly  and  despairingly. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
LAST  YEARS 

C  LOUGH  spent  three  years  at  his  teaching  in 
London.  The  first  of  them,  it  was  remarked 
in  the  preceding  chapter,  he  called  at  a  later  period 
the  worst  year  of  his  life.  But  the  two  years  that 
followed  it  were  not  much  better.  It  began  to  ap- 
pear to  him  that  he  had  made  a  mistake  in  leaving 
Oxford.  "  I  have  jumped  over  a  ditch  for  the  sake 
of  the  experiment,"  he  writes,  "  and  would  not 
be  disinclined  to  be  once  again  in  a  highway  with 
my  brethren  and  companions."  The  men  his  work 
in  London  brought  him  into  contact  with,  under- 
graduates and  seniors  alike,  were  less  congenial 
than  the  men  he  had  known  at  Oxford.  This  may 
have  been  a  matter  more  of  his  own  increasing 
reserve  than  of  an  essential  difference  in  quality 
between  the  two  communities  :  he  announces  his 
unfortunate  belief  in  the  theory  that  a  man  can 
scarcely  expect  to  make  a  new  friend  after  he  is 
thirty.  His  experience  had  been  such  as  to  make 
him  especially  dependent  on  friendships.  He  had 
had  many  dear  friends,  and  the  conditions  of  life  in 
college  had  made  it  easy  for  him  to  see  much  more 

155 


156      ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

of  them  than  it  is  possible  for  a  man  to  see  of  his 
friends  under  usual  circumstances.  Now  these  old 
friends  were  scattering  about  the  world,  and  marry- 
ing, and  he  missed  them.  And  he  had  lost  some 
of  them,  by  leaving  Oxford  and  the  Church.  Of 
new  ones  to  fill  these  places  there  were,  prominently, 
the  Carlyles.  He  was  a  frequent  visitor,  in  these 
years,  at  the  house  in  Cheyne  Row.  He  was  the 
sort  of  man  one  would  expect  Carlyle  to  like  :  aside 
from  his  personal  qualities,  he  was  singularly 
free  from  associations,  social  or  political  or  re- 
ligious, with  people  and  with  things  that  Carlyle 
hated,  and  he  must  have  been  one  of  the  most 
patient  and  unself-assertive  of  disciples.  And 
Carlyle  did  like  him.  He  says  in  a  letter  to 
Froude,  after  Clough's  death  :  "A  mind  more  vivid, 
more  ingenious,  more  veracious,  mildly  radiant, 
I  have  seldom  met  with,  and  in  a  character  so 
honest,  modest,  kindly.  I  expected  great  things 
of  him." 

\  The  word  that  is  surprising  in  this  tribute  is  **  in- 
genious." An  ingenious  man  would  have  got  more 
satisfaction  out  of  living  than  Clough  was  getting 
at  this  time ;  an  ingenious  man  might  even  have 
made  a  success  out  of  the  University  Hall  experi- 
ment, which  in  Clough's  hands  failed,  so  that  he 
lost  his  place  there.  Or  if  that  work  was  hopelessly 
disagreeable,  he  might  have  found  a  way  to  shorten 
the  time  he  gave  it,  in  order  to  devote  himself  to 
pleasanter  tasks.     But  he  himself  probably  con- 


LAST   YEARS  157 

sidered  that  ingenuity  bordered  on  trickery,  and 
trickery  on  dishonesty  ;  there  is  nothing  to  show 
that  he  ever  attempted  to  display  it  or  to  cultivate 
it.  So  his  moral  instinct  would  let  him  regard  it 
as  cheating  to  find  any  spare  moments  to  apply 
to  any  other  work  than  that  he  was  hired  to  do. 
His  apologists  are  at  great  pains  to  explain  that  his 
mind,  though  powerful,  had  this  remarkable  peculi- 
arity, that  it  "  could  not  work  unless  under  a 
combination  of  favourable  circumstances."  The 
equally  interesting  reflection  occurs  in  the  Memoir 
that  the  prospect  that  any  writing  might  be  profitable 
"seemed  to  make  it  impossible  to  him  to  write." 
This  is  to  be  mystical  about  a  matter  that  Clough 
himself  would  probably  have  liked  to  see  stated  more 
frankly  :  he  had  more  plough-horse  than  Arab  in 
him,  and  drudged  unnecessarily  because  he  liked 
to  drudge.  This  comes  out  in  letters,  written  while 
he  was  translating  Plutarch,  which  tell  how  greatly 
he  prefers  the  task  of  translating  to  that  of  writing 
for  the  North  American  Review,  or  even  that  of  writ- 
ing verse.  In  his  moralizings  he  talks  more  and 
more  about  patience — not  a  good  sign  that  the  high 
expectations  of  him  early  formed  and  still  enter- 
tained by  a  smaller  number  of  friends  were  ever 
going  to  be  fulfilled. 

This,  of  course,  is  to  be  rather  hard  on  Clough. 
But  it  cannot  be  overlooked  that  the  spectacle  he 
affords  in  this  most  important  period  of  his  life  is 
very  disappointing.     It  is  irritating  to  see  coming 


15^  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to  so  little  a  character  so  carefully  and  honestly 
forged  and  a  mind  that  had  been  so  fortunate  in 
its  opportunities  for  contacts  of  the  sort  most  likely 
to  be  helpful.  It  is  irritating  to  see  a  man  so  inde- 
cisive— to  find  him  writing  to  his  correspondents 
things  like  this  :  "  As  for  the  objects  of  life,  Heaven 
knows  !  they  differ  with  one's  opportunities,  (a) 
Work  for  others — political,  mechanical,  or  as  it 
may  be.  (h)  Personal  relations,  (c)  Making  books, 
pictures,  music,  etc.  {d)  Living  in  one's  shell. 
*  They  also  serve  who  only  stand  and  wait.'  I  speak 
as  a  philosopher,  otherwise  fool."  But  this  frame 
of  mind  in  Clough  was  not  permanent,  and  perhaps 
the  best  thing  to  do  is  to  hurry  through  with  the 
extent  of  time  that  it  lasted.  It  was  not  Clough 
himself  that  brought  it  to  an  end,  one  regrets  to 
say,'  so  much  as  press  of  circumstances.  After 
he  had  left  University  Hall,  Clough  stayed  on  in 
London  for  a  time  as  Professor  of  English  Language 
and  Literature  at  University  College,  at  a  salary, 
he  tells  Emerson,  of  thirty  pounds  a  year.  To  the 
meekness  with  which  he  endured  this  poverty 
one  prefers  the  defiance  of  a  Johnson  or  even  the 
gay  irresponsibility  of  a  Goldsmith. 

A  new  college  was  founded  out  in  Australia,  and 
Clough  applied  for  the  principalship.  He  came 
near  enough  to  getting  it  to  become  engaged  on 
the  prospect — to  Miss  Blanche  Smith,  of  Combe 
Hurst,  Surrey.  But  another  man  got  the  appoint- 
ment.    He  tried  to  get  a  place  in  the  Education 


LAST  YEARS  159 

Office.     But  his  friends  were  Liberals,  and  just  as  it 
seemed  their  efforts  might    be    going  to  succeed, 
the   Liberals  were  thrown  out  of  office.     In  this 
pass  he  looked  to  America.     In  June  1852  he  wrote 
to  his  friend  Emerson  to  learn  if  in  his  judgment 
there  was  a  chance  of  earning  a  living  "  anywhere 
between  the  Atlantic  and  the  Mississippi,  by  teach- 
ing Latin,  Greek,  or  English."    The  good  opinion 
of  Clough  which  Emerson  had  formed  on  his  visit 
to  Oxford  had  been  strengthened  by  a  liking  for 
The  Bothie.     In  the  Journal,  for  1849,  occurs  this 
passage  :     "  Clough 's  beautiful  poem  I   read  again 
last  in  the  sitting-room.     'Tis  a  kind  of  new  and 
better    Carlyle  :     the    Homeric    iteration    is    one 
secret ;    the   truly   modern   question   and   modern 
treatment  another  ;   and  there  is  abundance  of  life 
and  experience  in  it.    Good  passages  are,the  prayer 
to  the  sun  and  moon   and   hours    to  pass  slowly 
over  Philip  and  Elspie,  and  good  youth  in  it,  as 
Elizabeth  Hoar  says."     It  was  a  kindly  and  cheer- 
ing reply,  therefore,   which   Clough  received  from 
Emerson  ;  and  though  he  could  not  "  take  the  next 
ship,"    as    he  was    urged  to  do,  he  sailed   on  the 
Canada  from  Liverpool  to  Boston  on  October  30, 1852. 
He  had  as    fellow   passengers    on    this   voyage 
Thackeray  and  James  Russell  Lowell.    With  Lowell 
he  immediately  struck  up  a  warm  and  lasting  friend- 
ship.    He  found  in  him  another  fervent  admirer 
of  The  Bothie.     In  a  letter  to  C.  F.  Briggs,  the  editor 
of  Putnam's  Monthly,  Lowell  says  of  Clough :  "  I  wish 


i6o     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to  write  a  review  of  his  Bothie  to  serve  him  in  event 
of  a  new  edition.  It  is  one  of  the  most  charming 
books  ever  written — to  my  thinking,  quite  as  much 
by  itself  as  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield."  In  another 
letter  to  the  same  correspondent  Lowell  calls  The 
Bothie  "a  rare  and  original  poem.  I  do  not  know," 
he  says, "  a  poem  more  impregnated  with  the  nine- 
teenth century,  or  fuller  of  tender  force,  and  shy, 
delicate  humour."  With  Thackeray,  too,  Clough 
was  on  very  friendly  terms,  though  they  did  not 
keep  up  the  friendship — and  it  would  have  been 
very  surprising  if  they  had  kept  it  up,  being  men  so 
unlike.  Clough  was  not,  of  course,  a  celebrity  in 
a  class  with  these  two.  But  at  dinner,  the  last  day 
out,  toasts  were  drunk,  starting  with  Thackeray, 
and  to  Lowell  as  "  the  American  poet";  and 
Lowell,  in  responding,  Clough  says,  "  proposed 
the  English  poet,  me  ! — and  all  the  people  stared 
at  this  extraordinary  piece  of  information."  This 
was  his  first  taste  of  the  small,  but  delightfully  re- 
freshing  cup  of  fame  that  was  proffered  to  him  in 
America. 

Clough  spent  some  of  his  time  on  this  journey 
in  writing  lyrics.  These  were  included  in  later 
editions  of  the  poems  as  Songs  in  Absence.  Most 
of  them  are  addressed  to  the  lady  who  became  his 
wife.  They  are  lacking  in  many  of  the  traditional 
virtues  of  love  poetry.  Clough  was  no  Romeo: 
he  is  not  passionate,  and  he  does  not  praise  his 
mistress  nor  seek  to  please  her  by  saying  things 


LAST  YEARS  i6i 

prettily.  There  is  some  fervour,  but  he  does  not 
exaggerate  it.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  he  was  definitely 
underestimating  his  feelings  in  one  of  the  poems. 
He  has  been  lamenting  that  friendships  do  not  sur- 
vive partings,  and  turns  in  the  last  stanza  to  say 
this  of  a  stronger  form  of  attachment : 

"  But  love,  the  poets  say,  is  blind ; 
So  out  of  sight  and  out  of  mind 
Need  not,  nor  wUl,  I  think,  be  true. 
My  own  and  only  love,  of  you." 

It  cannot  even  be  said  that  this  is  simplicity  of 
the  expensive  sort.  Yet  there  is,  perhaps,  some 
poetry,  and  the  ultimate  guarantee  of  sincerity,  in 
the  fact  that  a  man  brought  up  on  Virgil  and  Horace 
can  express  to  his  beloved  such  rudimentary  senti- 
ments in  such  rudimentary  words. 

His  first  few  days  in  Boston  Clough  spent  in  com- 
pany with  Thackeray,  who  was  being  received  cor- 
dially but  much  less  uproariously  than  Dickens  had 
been.  Thackeray  moved  on  to  New  York  in  a  few 
days,  and  left  the  remaining  literary  honours  of  the 
season  to  be  paid  to  Clough.  Emerson  and  Lowell 
and  Longfellow  and  the  Ticknors  and  the  Nortons 
dined  him  and  took  him  about,  and  made  him  feel 
more  at  home  in  a  strange  land  than  he  had  felt 
for  a  long  time  in  his  own  country.  It  was  not  a 
great  number  of  people  who  thus  interested  them- 
selves in  him,  but  those  who  did  so  were  of  all 
Americans  the  best  known  in  England  and  the  most 
to  be  desired  as  friends.     "  I  am  not  at  all  a  distin- 


i62     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

guished  literary  man  in  some  eyes  here,  remember, " 
Clough  writes  home.  He  entered  into  the  sober 
entertainments  of  his  New  England  friends  natur- 
ally, and  with  much  of  the  impressiveness  of  reserve, 
and  increased  the  strength,  if  not  greatly  the  extent, 
of  his  popularity.  There  is,  for  instance,  an  evening 
of  theatricals  at  the  Nortons',  and  Clough  pleases 
everybody  with  an  epilogue  that  he  writes.  And 
there  is  a  supper  with  Lowell,  at  which  Webster 
and  Dana  tell  stories,  and  Clough  effaces  himself 
and  plays  the  part  of  a  good  listener.  Everywhere 
people  had  read  The  Bothie,  and  would  lay  a  copy 
of  it  on  the  parlour  table,  where  its  author  would 
be  pleased  to  see  it.  Men  sought  his  opinions,  and 
pondered  them.  Nothing  could  have  been  more 
wholesome  for  Clough  than  the  kindliness  of  this 
reception. 

A  week  after  his  arrival  he  took  lodgings  in  Cam- 
bridge, where  he  lived  the  whole  of  his  short  stay 
in  America.  He  got  his  first  pupil  almost  imme- 
diately, in  a  six-foot,  seventeen-year-old  scion  of 
the  Winthrop  family.  Clough  taught  him  Greek 
three  hours  a  day.  Soon  there  is  another  boy  or 
two,  and  then  a  little  private  class  in  Ethics.  His 
friends  get  some  writing  for  him  to  do  for  The  North 
American  Review  and  Putnam's.  Presently  he  ar- 
ranges with  Little,  Brown  &  Co.  to  revise  the 
Dryden  translation  of  Plutarch's  Lives  for  them. 
This  last  work  pleased  him  only  too  well ;  he  devoted 
time  to  it  that  he  would  better  have  spent  on  under- 


LAST  YEARS  163 

takings  that  might  lead  to  something.  His  sponsors 
advised  him  that  his  best  chance  in  America  was 
to  start  a  school  for  boys,  or  perhaps  for  girls. 
Clough,  for  a  time  at  least,  took  kindly  to  the  idea. 
In  his  Oxford  and  especially  his  Rugby  training, 
and  in  his  friendships  with  just  those  men  whose 
recommendations  would  most  impress  American 
parents,  he  had  exceptional  advantages  for  such  an 
enterprise.  But  he  let  the  opportunity  go.  His 
ambition,  which  he  declares  has  revived  in  the  Bos- 
ton air,  had  not  revived  sufficiently  ;  or  he  had 
overestimated  the  willingness  he  protests  to  his 
fiancee  to : 

"  Apply  for  service  ;    day  by  day 
Seek  honest  work  for  honest  pay, 
Without  a  fear  by  any  toil 
The  over-cleanly  hand  to  soil." 

Also  his  first  delight  with  America  had  moderated 
to  a  point  which  permitted  such  perceptions  as  that 
"  people  are  cleverer,  and  know  more  over  there," 
and  that  "  this  climate  certainly  is  to  my  somewhat 
rheumatic  constitution  rather  trying."  And  Carlyle 
kept  on  trying  to  get  him  a  Government  position, 
and  at  last  in  the  spring  of  1853  was  able  to  hold 
out  the  definite  offer  of  a  place,  though  a  humble 
place,  in  the  Education  Office.  And  Miss  Smith 
advised  return.  On  June  22  Clough,  who  was  not 
much  given  to  complaining  of  such  things  as  the 
weather,  objects  to  a  temperature  of  ninety-four 
degrees,  and   on   the   next  day  still  more  stoutly 


i64     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

to  a  sudden  change  which  has  given  him  a  cold. 
Some  days  later  he  telegraphs  for  a  berth,  and  sails 
from  New  York  by  the  next  boat. 

In  the  course  of  his  eight  months  in  America 
Clough  had  done  a  considerable  quantity  of  writing. 
Particularly,  the  only  magazine  articles  he  ever 
had  printed  were  done  at  this  time.  He  makes 
in  The  North  American  for  July  1853  his  only  ap- 
pearance in  the  character  of  critic.  He  reviews  the 
poems  of  Alexander  Smith  and  of  Matthew  Arnold. 
On  Smith's  Life  Drama  he  has  some  good  things 
to  say,  but  says  them  very  tentatively — and  in 
connection  with  a  dull  poem.  It  is  the  everyday 
subject  matter  that  he  approves,  and  he  goes  on  to 
develop  rather  eloquently  his  ideal  of  modem  poetry. 
"  Could  not  poetry,"  he  asks,  "  attempt  to  convert 
into  beauty  and  thankfulness,  or  at  least  into  some 
form  and  shape,  some  feeling,  at  any  rate,  of  content, 
the  actual,  palpable  things  with  which  our  every- 
day life  is  concerned :  introduce  into  business  and 
weary  task-work  a  character  and  a  soul  of  purpose 
and  reality  ? .  .  .  Might  it  not  divinely  condescend  to 
all  infirmities  ;  be  in  all  points  tempted  as  we  are ; 
exclude  nothing,  least  of  all  guilt  and  distress,  from 
its  wide  fraternization  ;  not  content  itself  merely 
with  talking  of  what  may  be  better  elsewhere,  but 
seek  also  to  deal  with  what  is  here  ?  "  The  trouble 
with  this  description  of  the  right  poetry — there  is 
more  of  it,  but  to  the  same  effect — is  that  it  makes 
no  provisions,  and  seems  not  to  feel  the  need  of  a  pro- 


LAST  YEARS  165 

vision,  for  poetry's  remaining  poetry  while  it  does 
all  these  things.  One  fears  that  Clough  would  have 
admitted  all  knowledge  as  poetry,  without  insist- 
ing on  any  evidences  of  the  breath  and  finer  spirit. 
He  finds  his  friend  Arnold  a  better  poet  than  Smith, 
though  he  berates  him,  it  is  amusing  to  see,  for 
his  share  in  "  something  of  an  over-educated  weak- 
ness of  purpose  in  Western  Europe."  He  finds 
in  him  "  a  disposition  to  press  too  far  the  finer 
and  subtler  intellectual  and  moral  susceptibilities." 
Thus  does  the  best  of  pots  call  the  kettle  black ; 
and  is  justified  in  so  doing,  too,  when  it  has  con- 
tracted to  tell  what  it  honestly  thinks  of  the  kettle, 
and  when  its  first  attention  goes  naturally  to  black- 
ness, from  having  had  sad  experience  of  its  own 
with  that  phenomenon.  The  real  fault,  or  the 
main  fault,  of  the  essay  is  that  it  is  too  heavy- 
handed. 

This  fault  appears  more  glaringly  in  two  attempts 
at  the  light  essay,  which  Clough  published  in  Put- 
nam's in  the  summer  of  1853,  under  the  title  "  Letters 
of  Parepidemus  " — letters  of  a  sojourner.  Both  are 
oracular  in  style,  and  somehow  desperately  moral, 
though  not  on  moral  subjects.  The  first  is  on 
the  necessity  of  unlearning,  and  is  itself  very  didac- 
tic. The  second  is  about  hexameters  :  it  argues 
against  them,  and  denies,  what  Arnold  was  later 
to  contend,  that  Homer  can  be  translated  success- 
fully and  to  best  advantage  in  hexameters.  The 
papers  are  sound  enough,  but  in  reading  them  one 


i66  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

longs  for  a  touch  of  verve,  and  to  secure  it  would 
welcome  wild  extravagance  of  opinion  and  shock- 
ing immorality.  In  addition  to  the  intimate  and 
the  critical,  Clough  turned  his  hand  to  the  political 
essay  :  this  in  a  review  of  a  work  on  social  theories 
of  the  age.  He  has  occasion  here  to  be  dubious 
of  the  advantages  of  liberty,  and  certain  of  what 
Carlyle  and  Ruskin  had  been  telling  people  about 
the  greater  importance  of  service  willingly  rendered. 
The  turn  of  his  own  that  he  gives  to  their  teaching 
does  not  improve  it  :  "  It  is  very  fine,  perhaps  not 
very  difficult,  to  do  every  now  and  then  some  noble 
or  generous  act.  But  what  is  wanted  of  us  is  to 
do  no  wrong  ones."  To  say  things  like  that  is 
to  be,  in  all  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  word, 
infelicitous. 

At  the  same  time  that  he  was  ruining  his  writing 
for  publication  with  such  early  Puritan  precepts 
as  this,  Clough  was  saying  things  in  his  letters  that 
anticipate  William  James.  Speaking  of  what  he 
calls  mysticism  (he  defines  it  as  "  letting  feelings 
run  on  without  thinking  of  the  reality  of  their 
object  "),  he  writes :  "  It  won't  do  :  twice  two  are 
four,  all  the  world  over,  and  there's  no  harm  in  its 
being  so  ;  'tisn't  the  devil's  doing  that  it  is  ;  il 
faut  s'y  soumettre,  and  all  right."  And  again : 
^'  The  plain  rule  in  all  matters  is,  not  to  think 
what  you  are  thinking  about  the  question,  but  to 
look  straight  out  at  the  things  and  let  them  affect 
you  ;    otherwise,  how  can  you  judge  at  all  ?  "    If 


LAST  YEARS  167 

Clough  could  have  seen  it  as  at  least  as  important 
that  you  should  affect  things  as  that  things  should 
affect  you,  and  could  have  seen  the  two  things  at 
the  same  time — he  might  then  have  been  the  leader 
of  desolate  Carlyleans  that  Emerson  hoped  he  would 
be.  But  he  never  got  his  glimpses  of  the  truth 
properly  co-ordinated.  His  American  experience 
did,  however,  give  him  a  somewhat  more  cheerful 
and  more  practical  attitude  toward  the  conduct 
of  his  own  life. 

Clough  was  not  the  man  to  think  he  had  learned 
all  about  America  in  eight  months,  and  did  not 
write  a  book  about  his  visit.  All  his  casual  remarks 
about  American  people  and  conditions  show  an 
open-mindedness  and  an  utter  freedom  from  pre- 
judice that  seem  normal  now,  but  were  highly  ex- 
ceptional in  the  middle  of  the  last  century.  He 
was  willing  from  the  first  to  find  America  as  good 
a  land  as  the  mother  country,  and  finished  by  liking 
it  better.  In  making  his  comparisons  he  was  struck 
by  resemblances  more  than  by  differences,  and  so 
was  able  to  please  his  Cambridge  neighbours  by 
telling  them  that  he  felt  himself  back  in  Oxford  in 
living  there.  He  was  just  the  man  to  give  the  New 
Englanders  full  credit  for  their  sincerity  and  their 
democratic  kindliness,  and  to  like  them  very  little 
the  less  for  their  deficiency  in  cleverness  and  in 
savoir-faire.  He  is  more  disturbed  by  their  super- 
ficiality :  Emerson,  he  exclaims,  is  the  only  pro- 
found man  in  the  country.    The  thing  that  pleased 


1 68  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

him  most  of  all  was  the  better  position  of  the  lower 
classes,  and  the  practicability  of  being  poor  with 
as  much  decency  and  as  much  honour  as  the  rich 
could  enjoy.  Such  immediate  and  complete  sym- 
pathy did  not  lead  to  the  reception  of  impressions 
of  the  picturesque  kind  ;  and  Clough's  book,  if  he 
had  written  it,  would  have  been  as  much  duller 
than  Dickens',  even  to  American  readers,  as  it  would 
have  been  fairer  and  more  judicious. 

A  week  after  his  return  to  England  Clough  took 
up  his  work  in  the  Education  Office — the  work  that 
was  to  occupy  most  of  his  time  for  the  remaining 
eight  years  of  his  life.  He  had  come  to  the  Office 
late,  and  as  rules  of  seniority  governed  promotion 
pretty  completely  there  was  little  incentive  to 
attempt  to  make  a  brilliant  career  for  himself  as 
a  public  servant.  His  letters  do  not  complain  of 
his  work,  as  so  many  of  Matthew  Arnold's  complain 
of  similar  tasks.  He  seems  to  have  liked  routine 
•thoroughly.  On  June  12,  1854,  he  married  Miss 
Smith,  and  in  the  autumn  took  a  house  in  London, 
near  Regent's  Park.  Here  he  lived  for  five  years, 
and  then  removed  to  Campden  Hill,  in  Kensington. 
The  marriage  was  unquestionably  a  very  happy 
one.  It  brought  him  more  congenial  friends  than 
one,  since  his  wife  had  a  large  and  interesting  family 
connection,  which  included  the  Nightingales.  Three 
children  were  born  to  the  Cloughs  :  two  girls  and 
a  boy.  Mrs.  Clough,  in  the  Memoir,  says,  what 
any  one  knowing  him  personally  or  through  books 


LAST  YEARS  169 

would  know  beforehand,  that  Clough  was  ideally 
kind  and  attentive  to  his  children,  and  loved  nothing 
more  than  to  play  with  them.  Lowell  and  other 
men  who  saw  in  Clough  the  most  indubitable  genius 
they  had  met  made  no  mistake,  perhaps,  except  in 
the  kind  of  genius  they  thought  they  saw.  The 
genius  of  an  artist  he  lacked.  But  he  had  a  posi- 
tive genius  for  being  that  no  less  delightful  thing, 
a  good  man. 

To  read  Mrs.  Dough's  touching  denial  of  the 
judgment,  commonly  made  then  as  later,  that 
this  life  of  her  husband's  was  "  a  broken  life,"  is 
to  be  convinced  by  it.  He  had  attained,  she  is 
sure,  a  remarkable  degree  of  peace.  She  explains 
his  failure  to  give  expression  to  this  peace  by  its 
being  the  result  not  of  a  sudden  conversion,  surprised 
and  proud  and  anxious  to  make  itself  known  abroad, 
but  of  the  patient  thinking  of  years.  It  did  not 
quite  recognize  itself,  that  is  ;  and  if  it  had  done 
so  perhaps  it  would  have  been  the  less  peace.  There 
is  certainly  a  paradox  in  refusing  to  concede  that  a 
man  is  at  peace  unless  he  is  spending  his  days  and 
his  energies  in  proclaiming  it  through  the  land  : 
to  do  so  would  be  to  introduce  the  singular  dicho- 
tomy, passive  peace  and  active  peace.  His  widow 
says  that  Clough's  peace  was  a  "  temper  of  mind  "  ; 
and  that  suggests  the  making  of  the  old  distinction 
between  a  temperamental  and  a  reasoned  attitude. 
His  spirit  found  peace  when  his  mind  discovered 
that  for  mind  there  never  is  peace.    Attending  to 


170     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

his  intellectal  history,  we  conclude,  most  rationally, 
that  nothing  but  unrest  was  possible  for  him,  be- 
cause he  had  staked  everything  on  finding  truth 
and  had  failed  to  find  it.  We  decide  that  he 
must  have  been  unhappy.  And  then  we  are  con- 
fronted by  the  facts — that  he  went  about  his  work, 
in  these  later  years,  not  gloriously,  but  steadily 
and  comfortably  and  happily.  And  Mrs.  Clough's 
words  on  the  point  have  the  ring  of  candour  in  them, 
something  of  the  complete  candour  of  her  husband. 
If  she  could  not  read  his  mind,  neither,  certainly, 
can  we. 

Clough  kept  up  correspondence  with  C.  E.  Norton, 
Lowell,  Emerson,  and  Professor  Child,  supplying 
them  the  London  gossip  in  politics  and  literature, 
and  saying  nothing  about  religion.  Nor,  in  the 
letters  that  are  printed,  is  there  any  discussion  of 
the  more  substantial  thinking  of  this  important 
decade  in  the  fields  of  science  and  economics  and 
philosophy.  He  mentions  Mill's  Dissertations  once, 
without  a  word  to  indicate  that  he  has  read  them. 
That  he  saw  something  of  the  Arnolds  we  know  from 
them,  and  he  retained  some  intimacy  with  Carlyle. 
A  new  friendship  that  meant  much  to  him  was  with 
Miss  Florence  Nightingale,  who  was  a  "  double 
cousin  "  of  his  wife.  He  found  in  her  a  spirit  very 
like  his  own,  and  endowed  with  a  somewhat  stronger 
vitality.  She  too  had  come  through  harrowing 
religious  struggles  to  a  philosophy  of  service.  Sir 
Edward  Cook  speaks  of  the  long  talks  they  enjoyed 


LAST  YEARS  171 

having,  at  her  house  at  Matlock,  or  in  London. 
One  of  the  reasons  assigned  for  Clough's  decHne 
in  health  is  that  he  over-exerted  himself  in  devoting 
his  spare  time  to  her  enterprise  in  the  Crimean  War. 
This,  his  wife  says,  was  his  favourite  work  ;  and 
she  considers  that  nothing  gave  him  greater  satis- 
faction than  the  large  share  he  enjoyed  of  Miss 
Nightingale's  trust  and  reliance. 

It  was  for  some  reason  a  settled  principle  with 
Clough,  after  his  undergraduate  days,  that  he  could 
write  verse  only  in  vacations  and  on  journeys.  But 
vacations  from  the  Education  Office  were  short,  and 
devoted  to  his  family.  There  was  a  three  months' 
tour  in  Europe  in  1856  to  investigate  military 
schools  ;  but  the  work  to  be  done  was  real,  and 
allowed  no  time  for  versifying.  The  Bothie  was 
revised,  and  Amours  de  Voyage  prepared  for  pub- 
lication, and  year  after  year  saw  no  new  literary 
undertaking  entered  upon.  Yet  Clough  was  medi- 
tating all  the  time  a  renewal  of  his  poetical  work, 
and  in  a  new  manner.  He  had  found  a  new  master, 
or  a  new  source  of  suggestion,  in  Crabbe.  He 
writes  to  Professor  Child  in  1856,  "  I  have  been 
reading  pretty  nearly  through  Crabbe  lately.  .  .  . 
There  is  no  one  more  purely  English  (in  the  Dutch 
manner),  no  one  who  better  represents  the  general 
result  through  the  country  of  the  last  century. 
His  descriptions  remind  even  me  of  things  I  used 
to  see  and  hear  of  in  my  boyhood.  And  some- 
times,  though   rarely,   he   has   really   the   highest 


172     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

merit."  The  opportunity  to  turn  this  inspiration 
to  account  was  slow  in  coming,  but  came  at  last 
when  his  health  failed  him  in  1861,  and  he  was 
forced  to  travel  in  Southern  Europe,  and  rest. 
Then  he  started  the  collection  of  tales  which  he 
called  Mari  Magna,  the  last  and  in  some  respects 
the  best  of  his  works. 

The  prologue  promises  that  these  tales  will  be 
about  love  and  marriage.  To  tell  them  a  little 
company  of  travellers  across  the  Atlantic  is  pro- 
vided— the  author,  as  a  youth,  and  "  an  elder 
friend, "  a  young  and  successful  New  England 
writer,  an  English  clergyman,  a  rising  lawyer  of 
thirty-three,  the  ship's  mate.  Love  is  the  domi- 
nant theme  except  in  one  of  the  six  tales,  all  that 
were  completed.  This  one  is  the  poorest  of  the 
lot,  and,  Hke  Chaucer,  Clough  ascribes  the  telling 
of  it  to  himself.  Of  the  others,  two  are  by  the  law- 
yer, two  by  the  clergyman,  and  one  by  the  mate. 
All  of  them  were  written  while  Clough  was  travelling 
in  Greece,  in  France,  and  in  Italy,  in  the  last  six 
months  of  his  life.  He  was  working  on  a  draft  of 
The  Clergyman's  Second  Tale,  the  story  of  Christian, 
when  he  was  on  his  deathbed,  in  Florence.  Death 
came  before  he  had  reached  the  end  of  it,  but  later 
a  finished  version,  one  he  had  presumably  thought 
not  good  enough,  was  found  among  his  papers. 
It  is  only  in  the  author's  own  story  that  any  of  the 
foreign  atmosphere  of  the  places  of  composition  is 
utihzed.     The  Mate's  Tale,  though  it  is  EngUsh,  is 


.     LAST  YEARS  173 

concerned  with  types  that  Clough  did  not  know 
well ;  and  it  is  outlined  rather  thantold.  The  four 
other  stories  are  about  people  exactly  like  Clough 
himself  and  his  friends  ;  and  they  show  such  com- 
plete and  such  ripened  reflection  on  the  problems 
they  present  as  to  leave  no  doubt  that  they  are 
based  on  situations  in  Clough' s  own  life — or  better, 
perhaps,  they  represent  his  working  out  of  situa- 
tions that  almost  occurred  in  his  Hfe. 

The  most  remarkable  merit  of  these  stories  is 
the  wisdom  with  which  the  state  of  marriage  is 
regarded.  They  do  not,  like  most  Victorian  stories, 
over-emphasize  the  mystical  or  the  sentimental 
aspects  of  marriage.  On  the  other  hand,  they  are 
not  too  matter  of  fact.  Clough  seems  to  hit  very 
close  to  the  golden  mean  between  the  practical  and 
the  romantic,  between  the  physical  and  the  spiritual. 
His  understanding  of  all  motives  concerned,  and 
his  sympathies  with  them,  seem  complete.  Par- 
ticularly strong  and  sensible  is  the  opening  story, 
of  the  young  college  fellow  persuaded  by  a  married 
cousin,  a  little  older,  whom  he  has  loved,  to  forsake 
academic  wisdom  and  solitude  and  to  go  out  and 
taste  real  life  in  making  a  living  for  a  wife  of  his  own. 
In  the  preference  here  declared  may  be  found  the 
key  of  Clough 's  life,  if  there  is  ever  anything  so 
rational  as  a  key  of  a  life.  The  lesson  is  the  old 
one  of  The  Bothie,  but  taught  now  with  fuller  under- 
standing and  more  seriously  and  in  plainer  words. 
In  plainness  of  words,  indeed,   Clough  goes  even 


174     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

beyond  Crabbe.  He  had  been  reminded  of  the 
things  of  his  youth,  as  he  wrote  to  Professor  Child ; 
and  being  so  reminded  of  them,  he  wrote  about 
them  in  a  heightened — ^perhaps  better,  a  lowered — 
form  of  Crabbe 's  manner.  But  if  he  is  more  austere 
with  his  words  than  Crabbe,  he  is  less  austere  with 
his  people.  They  believe  in  happiness,  all  of  them 
— in  a  stern  way,  are  optimists.  They  get  on  their 
feet  in  life  without  trampling  others.  Like  The 
Bothie,  Mart  Magno  contains  the  kind  of  experience 
one  would  like  to  see  added,  in  the  way  reading 
adds  to  the  experience  of  young  people,  to  the 
experience  of  students  in  the  schools. 

Mrs.  Clough  recounts  fully,  in  the  Memoir,  the 
circumstances  of  her  husband's  declining  health 
and  death.  He  had  never,  she  thinks,  been  parti- 
cularly rugged,  and  the  worry  and  strain  of  earlier 
years  had  told  on  his  constitution.  In  1859  ^^ 
began  to  suffer  from  a  succession  of  minor  illnesses. 
His  vacation  in  the  fall  of  i860  left  him  feeling  unfit 
for  work,  and  he  secured  a  six  months'  leave  of 
absence  from  the  Education  Office.  He  went  first 
to  Malvern,  and  then  to  the  Isle  of  Wight.  There 
he  lived  near  Freshwater,  and  saw  much  of  the 
Tennysons.  In  April  of  1861  he  set  off  alone 
for  Constantinople  and  Greece,  and  wrote  very 
cheerful  letters  back  about  the  things  he  saw  and 
the  people  he  met.  He  tired  of  solitude,  however, 
and  returned  to  England  in  June,  earlier  than  he 
had    been    expected.      In    July    he    went,     again 


LAST  YEARS  175 

alone,  to  Mont  Dore.  There  he  met  the  Tennysons, 
and  went  on  with  them,  or  after  them,  to  Luchon 
and  Cauterets,  and  other  resorts  in  the  Pyrenees. 
His  health  permitted  him  to  go  about  freely  in 
diligences,  on  horseback,  or  even  on  foot.  While 
he  was  there  his  third  child  was  born,  a  little  girl, 
whom  he  never  saw.  In  the  middle  of  September 
his  wife  joined  him,  in  Paris,  and  they  journeyed 
leisurely,  and  for  the  first  part  of  the  way  very 
pleasantly,  through  Switzerland  over  the  Simplon 
into  Italy.  At  Milan  Clough  felt  suddenly  worse, 
and  they  hurried  on  to  Florence,  where  there  were 
English  physicians.  They  arrived  there  on  October 
12.  For  two  days  of  sight-seeing  Clough  kept  on 
his  feet,  then  was  forced  by  fever  and  headaches 
to  take  to  his  bed.  He  derived  much  comfort  from 
working  in  this  last  illness  on  the  last  Man  Magno 
story,  and  for  a  time  seemed  to  improve  ;  but  a 
stroke  of  paralysis  followed  upon  the  decline  of  the 
malarial  fever.  He  sank  rapidly,  and  was  barely 
able  to  recognize  his  sister  when  she  arrived  from 
England  three  days  before  his  death. 

He  died  on  November  13,  1861,  and  was  buried 
in  the  Protestant  Cemetery  outside  the  walls  of 
Florence  in  the  direction  of  Fiesole. 


CHAPTER  IX 
CONCLUSION 

IN  the  half  century  and  more  that  has  elapsed 
since  his  death,  Clough  has  been  a  good  deal 
written  about.  Many  of  his  contemporaries,  and 
many  writers  for  the  reviews  of  more  recent  years, 
have  felt  that  Clough  needed,  or  deserved,  explana- 
tion, and  have  been  willing  to  undertake  the  task. 
He  has  provoked,  first  and  last,  a  considerable 
amount  of  thinking.  His  spoken  comments,  though 
he  was  not  loquacious,  made  men  think  while  he 
was  living ;  and  his  poems  and  his  letters  and  the 
plain  story  of  his  life  do  the  same  thing  now  that  he 
is  dead.  He  was  and  is  more  than  usually  instruc- 
tive. The  bulk  of  instruction  he  had  to  give  was 
not  unusually  great,  the  originality  of  it  not  parti- 
cularly pure,  and  the  form  of  it  not  in  itself  very 
attractive ;  but  it  proceeded  from  an  exceptionally 
reliable  source.  Men  who  knew  him  had  confidence 
in  him.  They  valued  his  words  because  they  knew 
he  had  weighed  them  carefully  in  scales  that  he 
had  taken  lifelong  pains  to  make  accurate.  Clough 's 
sanction  increased  the  value  of  any  idea,  because 

176 


CONCLUSION  177 

it  was  the  sanction  of  a  superlatively  honest  man. 
He  had  sacrificed  many  things  in  order  to  be  honest 
— ^had  indeed  made  himself  a  specialist  just  in  in- 
tellectual honesty.  His  speciality  did  not  win  him 
wealth  nor  much  fame,  but  it  won  him  the  thoughtful 
attention  and  the  respect  of  a  limited  number  of 
men  whose  respect  and  attention  were  cautiously 
bestowed. 

Some  of  the  eulogies  he  won  are  from  the  men 
of  all  others  of  his  age  whose  good  opinion  was 
most  to  be  prized.  In  his  own  country  Carlyle 
and  Bagehot  and  Arnold  praised  him, and  in  America^ 
Lowell  and  Longfellow  and  Emerson.  Lowell  has 
no  doubt  that  he  is  a  man  of  genius,  as  well  as  a 
man  of  the  highest  type  of  character.  Longfellow 
says,  simply  :  "I  like  him  exceedingly ;  with  his 
gentleness,  and  his  bewildered  look,  and  his  half- 
closed  eyes."  Emerson  sees  in  him  "a  new  and 
better  Carlyle,"  and  is  so  convinced  of  his  strength 
and  of  the  sureness  of  his  insight  that  he  appoin  ts  him 
"  Bishop  of  all  England,"  to  gather  up  the  wanderers 
Carlyle  had  left  in  the  desert,  and  to  lead  them  into 
the  promised  land.  Carlyle  himself,  as  we  have 
seen,  valued  no  less  highly  the  man  thus  authori- 
tatively singled  out  to  undo  his  work,  though  he 
was  unfortunate  in  his  choice  of  words  to  express 
his  appreciation.  Bagehot  awards  Clough  just  the 
praise  he  would  have  liked  best  in  thus  refusing  him 
praise  :  ''He  could  not  have  borne  to  have  his 
poems  reviewed  with   *  nice  remarks  '  and  senti- 

M 


178  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

mental  epithets  of  insincere  praise.  He  was  equal 
to  his  own  precept  : 

"  '  Where  are  the  great,  whom  thou  would'st  wish  to  praise  thee  ? 

Where  are  the  pure,  whom  thou  would'st  choose  to  love  thee  ? 

Where  are  the  brave,  to  stand  supreme  above  thee. 

Whose  high  commands  would  cheer,  whose  chidings  raise  thee  ? 
Seek,  seeker,  in  thyself  ;  submit  to  find 
In  the  stones,  bread,  and  life  in  the  blank  mind.' 

To  offer  petty  praise  and  posthumous  compliments 
to  a  stoic  of  this  temper  is  like  bringing  sugar-plums 
for  St.  Simeon  Stylites." 

It  was  Matthew  Arnold  who  knew  Clough  best, 
and  who,  in  Thyrsis,  did  more  than  any  other 
man  has  done  to  perpetuate  his  memory.  Thyrsis, 
of  course,  does  not  really  say  much  about  Clough 
— ^less  even  than  Lycidas  says  about  Edward  King. 
It  says  most  about  Arnold  himself,  and  next  most 
about  the  Cumner  hills,  and  about  a  favourite 
poem  of  Arnold's  own  composition  ;  and  it  is  rather 
hard  to  see,  what  Arnold  himself  was  only  half 
certain  of,  that  in  talking  about  these  interesting 
subjects  he  was  really  talking  about  Clough  all  the 
time.  And  Arnold  admits,  in  reply  to  an  objection 
of  Principal  Shairp's,  that  it  was  only  one  side,  and 
a  less  important  side,  of  Clough  that  he  had  in  mind. 
"  There  is  much  in  Clough,"  he  concedes,  "  (the 
whole  prophet  side,  in  fact)  which  one  cannot  deal 
with  in  this  way,  and  one  has  the  feeling,  if  one 
reads  the  poem  as  a  memorial  poem,  that  not  enough 
is  said  about  Clough  in  it ;  I  feel  this  so  much  that 
I   do  not  send  the  poem  to   Mrs.   Clough.     Still 


CONCLUSION  179 

Clough  had  this  idyllic  side,  too ;  to  deal  with  this 
suited  my  desire  to  deal  again  with  that  Cumner 
country  :  anyway,  only  so  could  I  treat  the  matter 
this  time."  Arnold  recognized  that  the  real  reason 
he  wrote  the  poem  was  to  follow  up  his  earlier  suc- 
cess with  The  Scholar-Gypsy.  From  the  way  in 
which  he  says  "  if  one  reads  the  poem  as  a  memorial 
poem  "  it  is  fair  to  conclude  that  he  expected  one 
would  read  it  as  some  other  kind  of  poem.  Yet 
he  had  specifically  called  TAyms,  in  a  sub-title,  "A 
Monody  to  commemorate  the  author's  friend,  Arthur 
Hugh  Clough,  who  died  at  Florence,  1861."  It 
is  not  meant  to  suggest  that  there  is  anything 
discreditable  in  this.  It  simply  shows  a  whole- 
somely greater  interest  in  a  live  oneself  than  in  a 
dead  somebody  else,  along  with  a  desire  to  do  the 
handsome  thing  by  that  somebody.  And  Thyrsis 
did  do  Clough 's  reputation  a  service.  It  is  doing 
well  by  a  man  even  to  mention  him  in  so  good  a 
poem.  But  some  people's  ideas  of  Clough  are  based 
on  Thyrsis,  and  therefore  probably  come  pretty 
far  short  of  correspondence  with  reality. 

But  at  other  times,  and  for  other  purposes,  Ar- 
nold said  some  very  true  things  about  Clough, 
and  some  splendid  things.  Everybody  knows  the 
eloquent  peroration  of  the  last  of  the  Lectures  on 
Translating  Homer,  with  its  selection  of  Clough 
as  the  shining  instance  of  Homeric  simplicity  in 
writing  and  in  living.  At  the  start  of  his  paragraph, 
Arnold  declares  his  intention  to  speak  of  literary, 


i8o  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

and  not  of  general  qualities  of  Clough's.  But  he 
gets  to  talking  of  the  man  himself,  after  a  sentence 
or  two,  as  every  one  else  has  done  who  has  set  out 
to  talk  of  Clough's  writings.  Three  sentences  are 
especially  good  :  "In  the  Saturnalia  of  ignoble 
personal  passions,  of  which  the  struggle  for  literary 
success,  in  old  and  crowded  communities,  offers 
so  sad  a  spectacle,  he  never  mingled.  He  had  not 
yet  traduced  his  friends,  nor  praised  what  he  de- 
spised. Those  who  knew  him  well  had  the  convic- 
tion that,  even  with  time,  these  literary  arts  would 
never  be  his."  Only  the  remark  which  introduces 
this  high  tribute  is  misleading.  Arnold  says  :  "  His 
interest  was  in  literature  itself  ;  and  it  was  this  that 
gave  so  rare  a  stamp  to  his  character."  Into  conflict 
with  this  comes  the  statement  attributed  to  Vis- 
count Morley,  that  he  thought  a  Life  of  Clough  ought 
not  to  be  included  in  the  English  Men  of  Letters 
series  for  the  reason  that  he  was  not  primarily  a 
literary  man.  And  most  people  perhaps  will  find 
it  hard  to  believe,  or  to  think  Arnold  actually  be- 
lieved, that  the  quality  of  Clough's  interest  in 
literature  was  the  deepest  thing  in  him,  the  thing 
that  determined  his  character.  This  deepest  thing 
was  rather  that  his  interest  was  in  righteous  living 
itself.  But  it  is  certainly  true  that  he  was  not 
interested  in  literature  for  the  money  and  the 
admiration  he  might  be  able  to  make  it  bring  him. 
If  he  had  been  so  interested  in  it,  he  would  doubt- 
less have  lived  worse  and  written  better. 


CONCLUSION  i8i 

The  strength  of  Arnold's  feeling  for  Clough  is 
best  shown  in  his  letters.  He  writes  to  his  much- 
loved  sister,  Mrs.  Forster,  in  August  of  1859  •  "  You 
and  Clough  are,  I  believe,  the  two  people  I  in  my 
heart  care  most  to  please  by  what  I  write."  And 
after  he  has  received  the  news  of  Clough 's  death, 
he  writes  to  his  mother  :  "  That  is  a  loss  which  I 
shall  feel  more  and  more  as  time  goes  on,  for  he  is 
one  of  the  few  people  who  ever  made  a  deep  impres- 
sion upon  me,  and  as  time  goes  on,  and  one  finds  no 
one  else  who  makes  such  an  impression,  one's  feeling 
about  those  who  did  make  it  gets  to  be  something 
more  and  more  distinct  and  unique.  Besides,  the 
object  of  it  no  longer  survives  to  wear  it  out  himself 
by  becoming  ordinary  and  different  from  what 
he  was.  People  were  beginning  to  say  about  Clough 
that  he  never  would  do  anything  now,  and,  in  short, 
to  pass  him  over.  I  foresee  that  there  will  now  be 
a  change,  and  attention  will  be  fixed  on  what  there 
was  of  extraordinary  promise  and  interest  in  him 
when  young,  and  of  unique  and  imposing  even  as  he 
grew  older  without  fulfilling  people's  expectation." 

There  is  a  special  interest  in  Arnold's  comment 
on  Clough  in  that  it  is  the  voice  of  a  poet  who  did 
a  great  work  in  the  world,  concerning  another  poet, 
remarkably  like  himself  in  nature  and  in  training, 
who  did  very  much  less.  The  two  are  generally 
discussed  together  in  reviews  of  nineteenth-century 
literature  and  entitled  "The  Poets  of  Doubt."  A 
symmetrical  way  of  correlating  the  title  and  the 


i82     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

difference  in  accomplishment  is  to  say  that  the  doubt 
overcame  the  one  poet  and  was  overcome  by  the 
other  ;  and  there  is  something  besides  symmetry 
to  justify  the  statement.  Yet  the  prevaiHng  tone 
of  the  poetry  of  the  comparative  failure  is  never 
complete  despair,  and  is  usually  courage  and  hope. 
This  contrast  might  be  taken  as  material  for  a  study 
in  the  effects  of  repression.  The  young  Arnold, 
when  he  experienced  despair,  bayed  the  moon 
right  humanly  and  lugubriously,  and  by  so  doing 
relieved  his  chest  and  his  nerve  centres  of  a  highly 
unprofitable  kind  of  emotion.  Whereas  Clough, 
when  he  despaired,  remembered  too  scrupulously, 
what  he  and  Arnold  had  both  been  carefully  taught, 
that  despair  is  unmanly,  and  so  set  to  work  to  sing,  as 
lustily  as  he  could — which  was  not  very  lustily — 
that  God,  if  not  indeed  in  his  heaven,  was  yet  doubt- 
less somewhere  about ;  and  strained  his  voice  by 
this  feat  of  ventriloquism. 

It  is  agreeable  to  see  that  Arnold  still  finds  his 
old  friend  **  imposing  "  in  his  later  years,  and  not 
merely  disappointing.  He  did  not  feel  that  the 
contradiction  of  expectation  by  fulfilment  was 
particularly  violent,  and  did  not  try  to  explain  it. 
A  number  of  reasons  for  it  have  been  assigned  by 
other  commentators  :  that  Clough 's  habit  of  mind 
was  too  critical,  that  he  was  too  fully  engrossed 
with  his  ideas,  that  he  was  too  negligent  of  the  con- 
ventions of  writing,  that  he  was  too  indecisive,  that 
he  was  not  sensitive  enough  to  beauty.     All  this 


CONCLUSION  183 

is  a  destructive  sort  of  criticism  ;  but  the  kind  of 
analysis  that  leads  to  it  is  tempting.  It  is  the  con- 
tradictions a  man's  life  affords  that  arrest  attention  ; 
and  this  difference  between  what  his  youth  promised 
and  what  his  maturity  fulfilled  is  one  of  a  number 
of  marked  contradictions  which  the  life  of  Clough 
presents.  The  first  of  these,  perhaps,  is  that  con- 
tradictions should  appear  at  all  in  a  life  so  con- 
trolled and  so  balanced  as  Clough 's. 

"  The  dangerous  edge  of  things,  "  says  Browning, 
is  what  interests  us  ;  and  Clough  was  a  seeker  after 
peace,  and  steered  away  from  dangerous  edges.  But 
in  avoiding  some,  he  came  upon  others — or  rifts 
appeared,  in  what  had  seemed  to  be  safe  ground. 
He  was  an  especially  religious  man,  and  as  a  re- 
sult acted  and  talked  so  as  to  get  himself  known  as 
particularly  irreligious.  By  Spartan  methods  he 
developed  and  retained  a  power  of  will,  a  superiority 
to  temptation,  which  amazed  the  men  who  knew 
him ;  yet  his  name  has  been  in  danger  of  becoming  a 
byword  for  irresolution.  He  was  a  man  of  intelli- 
gence and  yet  set  up  as  a  poet  without  any  real 
appreciation  of  the  first  principles  of  versification. 
These  are  a  few  of  the  major  contortions  in  what  is 
at  first  sight  the  unpromisingly  straight  and  smooth 
record  of  Arthur  Hugh  Clough. 

There  are  three  ways  of  explaining  these  con- 
tradictions— that  is,  of  saying  something  more  about 
them  than  that  they  exist.  They  may  be  discussed, 
first,   as   the   coming   together   in   the   individual. 


1 84  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

considered  as  an  arena,  of  two  opposing  tendencies 
of  his  age.  Or,  second,  regarding  the  individual 
as  responsible,  and  not  merely  as  a  battleground,  a 
pair  of  conflicting  traits  can  be  found  in  his  character 
to  correspond  to  and  to  provide  a  foundation  for 
each  specific  contradiction.  Or,  third,  still  resting 
responsibility  mainly  on  the  man,  there  may  be 
discovered  in  him  some  one  fatal  cleft,  so  far  down 
in  the  roots  of  his  nature  as  to  have  introduced 
division  into  all  his  counsels  and  all  his  sentiments. 
Attacks  of  all  three  kinds  have  been  plentifully 
directed  at  the  joints  in  the  armour  of  Clough. 

Proceeding  on  the  first  of  these  methods,  that  of 
explaining  a  man  in  terms  of  universal,  or  at  least 
of  national,  chronology,  some  critics  have  seen  in 
Clough  a  man  of  the  seventeenth  century  living 
among  Early  Victorians,  while  others  have  hailed 
him  as  a  citizen  of  our  own  present  day  living  among 
Early  Victorians.  Others  still  have  pronounced 
him  Early  Victorian  of  the  Early  Victorians  ;  but 
practically  all  of  these  have  gone  on  to  say,  or  to 
imply,  that  the  persistent  quality  which  establishes 
the  first  two  decades  of  the  reign  of  Victoria  as 
a  particular  and  a  definite  age  is  just  that  in  that 
time  there  was  not  one  age  going  forward  but  two 
ages,  two  remote  ages,  both  of  them  struggling  and 
crowding  into  the  one  limited  series  of  calendar 
years.  So  that  Clough  is  still  a  man  of  two  ages, 
and  for  the  very  reason  that  he  is  the  quintess- 
ence of  one  age.     He  is  a   dual  personality  in  a 


CONCLUSION  185 

time  when  everything  is  dual.  He  is  a  doubter  in 
an  Age  of  Doubt.  ^  , 

Assuming  that  the  logic  of  this  is  unimpeachable, 
which  it  probably  is  not — but  assuming  it,  it  re- 
mains to  ask  first,  if  any  age  that  ever  has  amounted 
to  anything  has  not  been  an  age  of  doubt,  and, 
second,  if  the  Early  Victorian  period  specifically 
was  not  much  more  an  age  of  cocksureness  than  of 
doubt.  •  Macaulay  and  Dickens  were  its  two  most 
effective  voices,  and  who  was  ever  more  cocksure 
than  either  of  them  ?  Nor  were  Carlyle  and  Mill 
devoid  of  strong  convictions  and  the  courage  of 
them.  So  rank  did  cocksureness  grow,  and  so 
completely  did  it  overspread  the  land,  that  in  the 
next  generation  Matthew  Arnold,  with  the  general 
agreement  of  the  intelligent,  was  to  pronounce  the 
English  just  the  smuggest  and  most  self-satisfied 
race  of  all  the  races  of  the  Western  world,  and  their 
cocksureness,  their  perfect  peace  of  mind,  to  be 
the  greatest  of  all  their  faults.  Few  times  and 
places  have  presented  a  busier  spectacle  of  people 
unreflectively  getting  things  done  than  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century  in  England.  Doubters 
were  so  rare  that  they  amazed  themselves  and 
others,  and  were  talked  about.  People  who  are 
particularly  interested  in  them,  who  find  them 
"  significant,"  can  call  the  period  an  age  of  doubt. 
For  the  same  reason  they  could  call  the  middle 
of  the  eleventh  century  an  age  of  doubt. 

It  is  possible  to  look  at  any  large   community 


i86      ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

of  recent  times  as  divided  into  two  parts — the  few 
more  thoughtful,  and  the  many  less  thoughtful, 
and  to  describe  the  difference  between  the  two 
sections-  as  a  difference  of  time  :  the  intelligent 
are  separated  from  the  less  intelligent  by  years 
or  by  centuries.  Are  these,  then,  to  be  regarded 
as  ahead  of  their  time,  or  are  those  to  be  described 
as  behind  it  ?  Are  these  advanced,  or  are  those 
backward  ?  And  when  Tolstoi  deliberately  drops 
out  of  the  presumed  van  of  civilization  and  incor- 
porates himself  as  completely  as  he  is  able  with 
the  rear,  are  we  to  call  him  a  leader  or  a  strag- 
gler ?  Is  our  time  scheme  to  rest  on  realities  or 
on  ideals  ?  Is  the  Early  Victorian  temper  the 
dyspeptic  temper  of  Carlyle,  who  hated  Early 
Victorian  England,  or  the  unruffled  temper  of 
Macaulay,  who  loved  it  ?  Was  William  Morris 
more  of  his  age  when  he  was  longingly  averting 
his  gaze  from  his  age  to  the  past,  or  when  he  was 
longingly  averting  his  gaze  from  his  age  to  the 
future  ?  Our  contemporary  Mr.  Wells  writes  fan- 
tastic stories  about  the  twenty-fifth  and  thirtieth 
centuries  a.d.  Is  he  ahead  of  his  time  in  so  doing, 
or  of  it  because  he  is  interested  in  working  out 
problems  he  sees  about  him,  or  behind  it  because 
he  writes  that  most  primitive  of  things,  the  fairy 
tale? 

These  questions  are  put  as  tending  to  show  once 
more  how  difficult  is  the  task  of  determining  the 
relation  of  a  man  to  his  time.     It  is  particularly 


CONCLUSION  187 

difficult  in  the  case  of  a  man  of  the  nineteenth 
century — or  in  the  case  of  a  man  of  our  own  cen- 
tury. Earlier  ages  had  discerned  that  they  rested 
on  the  shoulders  of  the  ages  that  preceded  them  ; 
but  the  nineteenth  century  was  the  first  to  set 
deliberately  about  taking  advantage  of  all  the 
privileges  of  the  position.  Men  took  •  to  skipping 
from  one  pair  of  antecedent  shoulders  to  another, 
and  pausing  a  longer  or  shorter  time  on  some  vantage 
point  to  proclaim  its  superiorities.  Many  a  man 
found  it  desirable  to  spraddle,  and  stretched  himself 
out  with  one  foot,  say,  on  Late  Byzantium  and  the 
other  on  Early  Judaea,  his  left  hand  on  the  French 
Revolution  and  his  right  on  the  Birth  of  Time. 
For  him  to  turn  from  his  religious  to  his  political 
and  then  to  his  artistic  ideas  or  his  metaphysics 
was — to  use  a  comparison  fairly  incompatible  with 
the  one  which  precedes — for  him  to  roam  ♦up  and 
down  the  centuries  as  an  organist  wanders  over 
his  stops.  Under  such  circumstances  it  is  neces- 
sary when  one  says  that  a  man  is  consistently 
of  the  nineteenth  century  to  say  also  in  what  nar- 
row respect  he  is  of  the  nineteenth  century — and 
even  then  what  one  says  is  likely  to  have  either 
no  meaning  at  all,  or  one  meaning  for  one  man 
and  another  for  another. 

The  respect  in  which  Clough  was  most  consis- 
tently of  the  nineteenth  century  is  that  all  of  the 
settings  he  uses  are  nineteenth-century  settings. 
His  long  narrative  poems  are  all  of  them  about 


i88     ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

people  of  his  own  time  ;  and  so  are  the  stories  that 
^is  lyrics  suggest — for  a  lyric  always  suggests  a  story 
of  some  sort  as  its  background.  Tennyson  and 
Browning  and  Arnold  took  much  of  their  material, 
most  of  it,  indeed,  from  the  past,  and  often  from 
the  traditions  of  other  nations  than  their  own. 
But  Clough's  criticism  of  life  is  invariably  of  the 
life  of  Britons  of  his  day  and  generation.  This 
is  a  real  peculiarity.  Its  importance  is  lessened, 
but  by  no  means  destroyed,  by  remembering  what 
modern  poems  Idylls  of  the  King  and  Empe- 
docles  on  Aetna  and  The  Statue  and  the  Bust  are, 
and  how  English,  in  spite  of  their  foreign  or  antique 
subject  matter.  Clough  found  human  life  enough 
in  the  world  about  him  without  going  far  afield 
for  it.  His  mind,  indeed,  however  powerful,  had 
not  the  intrepidity  for  travelling.  It  was  still 
finding  plenty  to  feed  on  in  the  home  pasture  when 
it  ceased  its  activities. 

It  is  not  to  be  denied  that  the  problems  Clough 
worked  at  are  also  all  of  them  nineteenth-century 
problems,  though  it  might  be  urged  that  the  nineteenth 
century  made  its  own  nearly  all  problems  of  all  times. 
And  it  was  the  most  universal  and  timeless  of  these 
problems  that  interested  Clough.  The  nature  of 
friendship  and  love  and  marriage  and  parenthood, 
the  service  of  God  and  fellow  service — ^he  examines 
directly  these  large  and  eternal  things,  and  not 
merely  abnormal  or  unusual  instances  of  them, 
or  aspects  of  them  considered  to  be  new.     He  was 


CONCLUSION  189 

not  the  man  to  care  much  whether  his  works  were 
up-to-date  or  not  and  whether  they  were  novel  or 
not.  Pettiness  of  all  sorts,  over- valuation  of  little 
things,  was  what  he  hated  most,  and  he  was  sin- 
gularly successful  in  avoiding  it.  Differentiating 
a  vast  number  of  aspects  of  a  thing,  and  arranging 
them,  perhaps  chronologically,  is  the  kind  of  thing 
he  called  "  fiddle-faddling  "  :  just  as  the  people 
who  find  profit  and  delight  in  that  kind  of  juggling 
find  '*  fiddle-faddling  "  Clough's  disposition  to  sit 
for  ever  on  large  problems  he  could  not  solve  instead 
of  deserting  them  for  little  problems  that  he  could 
solve.  But  others  than  philosophers  of  the  pigeon- 
holing school  may  fairly  object  to  this  disposition 
of  Clough's.  And  it  is  certainly  a  respect  in  which 
he  was  not  typical  of  his  age. 

Archbishop  Whateley  said  of  Clough  that  he  had 
no  following  :  meaning,  specifically,  that  his  defec- 
tion carried  out  of  the  Church  no  other  men  than 
himself.  This  is  true,  and  may  be  taken  as  showing 
on  Clough's  part  either  sense  and  consideration 
or  a  lack  of  courage.  To  call  his  refusal  to  prosely- 
tize good  sense  is  perhaps  to  be  reminded  of  the  great 
chapter  in  which  Dean  Swift  so  satisfactorily 
proves  that  all  revolutions  and  discoveries  in  human 
thought  are  varieties  of  madness ;  and  calling 
it  lack  of  courage,  one  may  remember  Emerson's 
dictum  that  "  there  is  a  certain  headiness  in  all 
action,"  and  that  courage  is  willingness  to  act. 
If  Clough  had  been  willing,  early  in  his  life,  to  set 


190  ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH 

limits  to  his  thinking,  to  pick  a  direction  and  a  road 
and  to  keep  the  road  and  pay  no  attention  to  byways, 
however  highly  recommended — if  he  had  been 
willing  to  do  this,  he  might  have  added  a  new  form 
of  protest  against  the  Church  to  the  other  fine 
enthusiasms  of  his  day,  and  might  have  ridden  off  on 
it  and  cut  a  figure.  But  before  he  could  mount 
for  his  ride  and  gallop  off  to  become. another  Great 
Victorian,  it  was  necessary  that  he  should  tell 
himself  that  he  had  settled  problems  which  he  felt 
that  he  had  not  settled,  and  this  for  better  and  for 
worse  he  was  unable  to  do. 

In  a  world  in  which  the  chances  of  a  man's  accom- 
plishing anything  memorable  are  small,  it  may 
appear  graceless  to  be  asking  so  insistently  why 
this  man  did  not  accomplish  more,  instead  of 
marvelling  that  he  accomplished  so  much  as  he  did. 
New,  though  perhaps  small,  editions  of  Clough 
have  been  appearing  at  rather  short  intervals  ever 
since  his  death.  He  wrote  and  he  is  read.  Public 
taste,  on  the  whole,  seems  to  be  moving  in  his 
direction  rather  than  away  from  him,  so  that  he 
will  probably  continue  to  find  readers.  And  so 
long  as  he  finds  them  they  will  probably,  even 
though  they  like  him,  keep  on  finding  him  some- 
thing of  a  failure,  and  speculating  on  why  he  failed. 
Lack  of  determination,  inadequate  opportunity, 
limited  comprehension — ^here  are  the  causes  of 
failure ;  but  Clough  had  a  strong  and  steady  will, 
the  best  of  training  and  of  friends,  a  wealth  of  good 


CONCLUSION  191 

sense.  More  careful  examination  will  show,  per- 
haps, that  the  determination  was  too  content  to 
remain  determination  instead  of  removing  the  need 
for  itself,  that  the  training,  though  splendid  for  the 
usual  boy,  was  of  the  wrong  kind  for  at  least  one 
boy,  and  that  a  disproportionate  share  of  the  good 
sense  rested  on  merely  vicarious  experience.  But 
behind  these  suppositions  will  lurk  a  presentiment 
of  some  unescapable  limitation  in  the  man  s  physical 
nature.  He  was  not  sufhciently  sensuous.  He 
did  the  best  he  could  with  a  nervous  system  that 
was  simply  not  finely  enough  organized,  not  delicate 
enough,  to  delight  and  gloriously  to  succeed  in 
creative  effort. 


\ 
/ 


INDEX 


Allingham,  William,  58 

Ambarvalia,  67,  115 

Amours   de   Voyage,    1 14-128, 

171 
Arnold,  Matthew,  19,  77,  79, 

91-2,     107-8,     120-1,     164, 

178-82 
Arnold,    Dr.    Thomas,   15-17, 

19-24,  27,  28-9,  40,  49,  50, 

54,  56.  64.  72 
Arnold,  Thomas,  jr.,  19,  21-2, 

77,  79,  96,  97 
Arnold,  Wm.  D.,  17 
Atlantic  Monthly,  1 15-16 

B 

Bagehot,  Walter,  60,  177 
Balliol  College,  36,  37,  46,  59 
Blank  Misgivings,  etc.,  53 
Bothie    of     Toher-na-Vuolich, 
The,  57-8,  80,  90,  94-11 1, 
129,  131,  159,  160,  162,  171, 

Burbidge,  Thomas,  18,  67 


Carlyle,   38,;  65-71,   107,   147, 

156,  163,  177 
Charleston,  S.  C,  9-10 
Chester,  13-14 
Child,  Professor  F.  J.,  170-1 


Clough,  Arthur  Hugh,  born, 
7 ;  Charleston,  9 ;  school 
at  Chester,  13  ;  Rugby,  15  ; 
Oxford,  36  ;  Fellow  of  Oriel, 
56  ;  resigns  fellowship,  87  ; 
Head  of  University  Hall, 
112 ;  engaged,  158 ;  to 
America,  159 ;  return  to 
England,  163 ;  Education 
Ofl&ce,  168  ;  marriage,  168  ; 
death,  175 

Clough,  Anne  Jemima  (sister), 
10,  63-4,  103-4 

Clough,  James  Butler  (father), 
I,  2,  8-9,  12-13,  61-2 

Clough,  Mrs.  (mother),  i,  2, 
10-12,  61 

D 

"  Decade,  The,"  77 
Dipsychus,  129-154 
Epilogue  to,  33-4 
Duty,  84 

E 

Easter  Day,  Naples,  1849,  135 
Emerson,  66,  92,  107,  159,  161, 

167,  170,  177 
Evening  Walk  in  Spring,  31-2 


Faust,  138-143,  146-7 


193 


194  INDEX 

G  O 

Guyot,  Edouard  (on  Clough),  Oriel  College,  56,  60,  89 

148-151  Oxford,  25,  36-44.  46-50,  54- 

61,  66-7,  76-81,  86-90,  94- 

^  5,  98-9,  112,  155-6 

Hexameters,  107-9  Oxford  Movement,  The,  37-41, 

Higher  Courage,  The,  51-2  ^^^  ^^^  ^2,  58 

I 

p 

Incident,  An,  $1 

Irish  Famine,  90-1  Palgrave,  F.  T.,  77,   116 

Parepidemus,  Letters  of,  165 
K  Paris,  93-4 

Kmgsley,  Charles,  95-6  P^^st  and  Present,  70 

Plutarch's  Lives,   Clough's 
L  edition  of,  163 

Lake,  W.  C,  18,  23  Pragmatism,  148-154,  166-7 

London  University,  38, 112-13,     Putnam's,  165 

158 
Longfellow,  107,  177  Q 

LoweU,  115, 159-62, 170, 177         <?^«  Cursum  Ventus,  80-1 
Love  Not  Duty,  84  Questioning  Spirit,  The,  83-4 

Qui  Labor  at.  Or  at,  69-71 
M 
Manfred,  144-6  R 

Mari  Magna,  30,  172-5  Rome,  1 13-14,  119,  122 

Music  of  the  World  and  of  the     Rossetti,  WiUiam,  95 
Soul,  54  Rugby,  15-36,  40,  60,  81 

Rugby  Magazine,  21 
N 

Newman,  John,  23,  37,  39,  41,  S 

48-50,  56,  74  Shairp,    John    Campbell,    56, 
New  Sinai,  The,  68-9  59,  77,  96-7 

Nightingale,     Miss     Florence,  Sic  Itur,  80-1 

104,  170-1  Smith,  Alexander,  164 

North  American  Review,   131,  Smith,  Miss  Blanche,  158,  160, 

164  163 

Norton,  C.  E.,  ^y,   131,   161,  Songs  in  Absence,  160-1 

162,  170  Stanley,  Arthur  P.,  18,  23,  yy 


INDEX  195 

T  V 

Tennyson,  175  Vaughan,  C.  J.,  18,  23 

Thackeray,  159-161  Venice,  130-1,  134-5 
Thyrsis,  79,  178-9 

To  Ka\6v,  54  W 

Tom  Brown  at  Oxford,  40  Ward,  W.  G.,  41,  43 

Tom  Brown's  Schooldays,  16, 18  Werther,  124-5 

Whateley,  39,  189 

U  Wordsworth,  31-2,  49,  85 

Y/Avo?  afxvo<i,  7 1 

University  Hall,  112-13,  129-  X 

30,  155-6  Xpxxrea  Kk-gs  ctti  y\utaa<l;  $2—^ 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by  Butler  &  Tanner,  Frome  and  London. 


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